Spend ten minutes with Aubrey Voboril and her passion for the game of softball will make itself unmistakably clear.
Voboril’s career has been a topsy-turvy one at times, filled with injuries and unexpected changes. As of this summer, she added “Head Coach” to her resume; she’s now tasked with rebuilding the program at Black Hills State.
You could call Voboril The Bionic Coach, and you wouldn’t be far off base – she’s had more than 15 surgeries in her lifetime, most of them originating from softball injuries. While those injuries threatened her playing career on more than one occasion, they also helped shape her into the coach that she is today.
“Something that I think helped me develop as a person and to realize my strength, even through all of the adversity I had to face, was the game,” Voboril mused. “Some coaches helped me see that there is success in facing adversity, and so that’s something that I want to share with other people, whether they’re in my position or just blessed with a body that works… that really hit me in my senior year of college, when I had back surgery, and I thought my playing career was over.
“I had exhausted my NCAA eligibility so my only option was to go NAIA; one person was willing to take me, and I told her about the back surgery and I said ‘I promise I’ll give you everything I have’. I learned a different way to be successful – after back surgery, being a curveball-heavy pitcher isn’t the way to go anymore – and we went to a World Series and I was an All-American there. The game will teach you so much more if you open yourself up to it and allow yourself to see it.”
Her own experiences of battling through injuries weren’t the only part of her playing career that Voboril built off of when she entered the coaching profession; after suiting up for three schools in total as a player, each stop gave her some unique takeaways that she would file away for use in the future.
“For instance, I played for a really tough coach at one point; she really toughened us up, but she was hard. But if I could play for her, I could pretty much go anywhere,” Voboril recalled. “I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, and I learned to see what works for specific types of athletes. That’s come from both coaching and playing for me, too.
“[Playing in so many places] introduced me to a lot of different playing styles, a lot of different tactics and what to do in a lot of situations… I always take every opportunity to learn, and to this day, everything I soaked up is super valuable to me. Something I’ve talked about, even on interviews, is that while I’m new to the head coaching world, I have a lot of really great mentors in my corner. That’s something that I take a lot of pride in and I’m super thankful for.”
In 2016, Voboril officially got her start in coaching as an assistant coach at Iowa Western Community College. After additional stints at D2 Sioux Falls and Seward County Community College, she entered this last summer with a goal of becoming a head coach in mind.
Nestled in Spearfish, a town of roughly 10,000 in western South Dakota, Black Hills State’s softball program has won just twenty games in the last three years. After some time under an interim head coach, the Yellow Jackets entered the summer in need of a permanent leader, someone who could build up their program.
Enter: Voboril.
Since she arrived in Spearfish, Voboril has done far more than coach. She’s organized fundraising opportunities, built a recruiting class from scratch, and become the program’s de facto gear customizer – armed with crafting supplies and a cricut machine, Voboril has created everything from gear to beverage tumblers that represent the program she now leads.
Luckily, as she looks to begin the rebuild of the Yellow Jackets program, Voboril isn’t going it alone. She has a built-in assistant coach alongside her: Fiance Kyle Honeycutt, a former private instructor and assistant coach at Nebraska-Kearney, fills out the new BHSU staff. The pair got engaged shortly before embarking on the journey to their new home of Spearfish and are one another’s cohorts in the rebuilding project for the Jackets’ program.
Voboril might not be the biggest name to come off the coaching carousel this summer, and Black Hills State might not be a historically-great program. But if passion and drive were the ranking factors, The Bionic Coach would be at the top of the list – and you can never underestimate the value of a coach’s never-ending enthusiasm and how it affects their team.
