Inside Pitch: The College Coaching Carousel Continues at the DI Level

We are now two months into the offseason for some teams, and the “Coaching Carousel” never stops spinning.

A flurry of head coaching hires at the Division I level have taken place over the last several weeks, and we’ve highlighted some of them for you here.

Extra Inning Softball contributor Justin McLeod of Justin’s World of Softball shares his thoughts on who are some key ones that will make a significant impact in our latest edition of his weekly “Inside Pitch” column…

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GEORGIA

The only SEC job to open this year, and one of just two Power Five positions thus-far, was Georgia… after a search following Lu Harris-Champer’s retirement, the Bulldogs named Tony Baldwin as head coach.

Baldwin was the favored choice by a number of program alumni and is well-thought of in many coaching circles. He remains in need of a coaching staff but will be a familiar face in the dugout next spring.

GEORGIA STATE

It took Georgia State a while to announce their hire – the head coaching job was open for nearly two months – but their new head coach is a familiar name in coaching circles. Angie Nicholson is taking the helm at GSU, inheriting the program in Atlanta after a stint as the head coach at Hampton.

Nicholson has been a D1 head coach for a number of years, including at Eastern Illinois before departing for the Hampton position, and helped sustain Hampton’s program through a year of no games in 2021 following the shortened 2020 campaign.

BOISE STATE

Justin Shults was a popular choice by Boise State after he was officially named the program’s head coach in late June. Shults spent the last couple of seasons at Oregon and was previously on staff at Fresno State and Miami.

After a solid season by the Ducks, and with positions open throughout the Mountain West conference, Shults was likely to get his pick of head coaching jobs and he chose Boise.

He’ll have a chance to grow and thrive with a Broncos program that is used to winning, but still building itself into permanent-contender status.

IDAHO STATE

Despite (or, perhaps, thanks to) only having a couple of schools that sponsor softball, the state of Idaho saw widespread coaching change this year, as Idaho State announced the hiring of Andrew Rich as head coach.

Rich was the associate head coach at Boise State, formerly on staff at Sonoma State and Fresno State, and was Maggie Huffaker’s top deputy and recruiting coordinator while at Boise. He knows the region and the state well.

UMASS

A hire couldn’t have been much easier or better than the one made by UMass, who brought program legend Danielle Henderson back into the fold as head coach.

Henderson, a former member of Team USA and one of the all-time greats in Minutewomen program history, spent the last several seasons as head coach at UMass-Lowell and helped that program rebuild and establish itself as a contender.

She will now seek to do the same at UMass, which once was a sturdy postseason contender but has been more topsy-turvy in terms of results in more recent years.

EAST CAROLINA

Further down the East Coast, East Carolina pulled Shane Winkler away from George Washington. Fresh off of a postseason berth at the helm of the Colonials, Winkler has a track record of his own with success in building up smaller-market programs and will now try to do the same with ECU.

Winkler brought with him his pitching coach from George Washington, Kiana Quolas, and also hired former GW superstar Jenna Cone as his second assistant.

SETON HALL

Seton Hall saw Paige Smith depart for non-coaching endeavors, and filled her role with Angie Churchill, who was most recently the head coach at Hartford and who has made a career of jump-starting northeastern programs.

Churchill’s career win-loss record is abysmal on paper, but look past the paper and she’s done a pretty nifty job of leaving programs in better position than when she found them.

Her work at Hartford leaves the softball program as one of the sports that can feel legitimately disregarded by the school’s recent decision to drop to Division III within the next several years.

MERCER

Though this is by no means an exhaustive list (there are more than 40 D1 head coaching moves this summer, to date), another notable move was Lindsay Fico becoming the new Mercer head coach, joining the Bears after three years as head coach at junior college Santa Fe in Gainesville.

Fico also coached in the Florida Gulf Coast League last summer and at the beginning of this summer season.