Bailey Huneycutt has one year left in her college softball career, but she has already cemented her legacy in Western Carolina program lore.
A North Carolina native with a soft accent to match, Huneycutt enjoyed one of the finest seasons in SoCon history as a true junior in 2021, hitting .364 with 14 home runs and earning the conference’s Player of the Year award.
She also owns the WCU career home run record with 37 career longballs to her credit, tops the program record books with more than 80 career walks, is one of just three players in Catamount program history to record 100 career RBIs, and is a three-time all-conference honoree.
And that list is not exhaustive; there’s more where those numbers and awards came from.
The trophy case is full already, but you wouldn’t know it by the way Huneycutt conducts herself. Perhaps the best example of her humility is her reaction to breaking the WCU home run record last season. It was a record that, until informed by others, she did not even realize she now held.
“I really didn’t know about it,” Huneycutt said. “I didn’t even know that I was close to the record until they announced at the Presbyterian game that I had tied it and I was like ‘oh, that’s cool’… before that, I wasn’t nervous or feeling pressure or anything, but once I found out that I tied the record, I think I was, in my mind, thinking that all I had to do was pop one more over ‘and I’ve got it’. Once I actually knew that I was right there at it was really when it just crept into my mind.”
Huneycutt is just as impressive off the field as she is on it. An engineering major, she admits to, at one point, having a “jumbled mess of time management”. But, as one would likely expect after five minutes of conversation with her, the tall infielder figured things out and managed to balance a tough major with her playing career.
Admitting she has a “creative mind, an imaginative mind”, her chosen industry was a perfect fit. She also has her post-college career paths all planned out.
Yes, paths – she’s even got her second act set.
“I want to work in engineering first, I want to have a good engineering job that I like,” Huneycutt said. “And then once I’m like ‘Alright, I feel like I’ve done all I can do in engineering’, then I want to go be a CEO or create my own company or something. It’s not a plan to fall back on, but it’s a plan for after engineering for me.”
Quiet and reserved as a youngster, Huneycutt says she has come out of her shell during the time she’s spent at WCU. She’s found avenues for the same joy she thrives on and says she wants to remembered one day “with a smile on my face.”
“I think I’ve always been an upbeat person,” Huneycutt said. “I just find the joy in anything that I do. Even when we’re doing stadiums and it’s thirty-six degrees outside, I’m trying to sing to get through it. God gifted me with this ability to find joy and happiness in really every aspect of life; when I wake up in the morning, even though it’s 6:00 am and it’s cold outside, my bed is warm. I get to go lift heavy things; people don’t all get to do that. I think the thing that makes Bailey Huneycutt tick is finding happiness in little things.”
Her faith is important, too, something that she emphasized when talking about the joy she finds in life, the ability to find a happy medium with time management, even with handling positives and negatives on the softball field.
“I’ve grown up with [church and faith] my whole life, and I really think that college has made me grow closer to God,” Huneycutt said. “There are so many things with being a student-athlete; it’s extremely hard. Just being a college *student* is extremely hard. And I think having all of those trials and problems that you come across in college, it’s really comforting to me to have the knowledge that you know somebody is still there that is listening, somebody that understands. And somebody who will love you no matter what.”
Huneycutt’s career in purple has already paid dividends on the field, both for her and for her team. The home runs are the headliners, the awards make for a nifty second-place finisher. But to hear the young lady herself tell it, it’s not softball that defines her and it isn’t the game she wants to be remembered for.
