The Journey to the Tourney for Eastern Illinois

The trip from Charleston, Illinois to Evanston is just a matter of a few hundred miles. 204.4 miles, to be exact.

That’s the trip that the Eastern Illinois softball team will make this week, and you’ve probably never seen a group of people happier to sit on a bus for hours at a time.

Making EIU softball’s first-ever trip to the NCAA tournament this week, the Panthers do so as the Ohio Valley Conference champions. En route to a championship, the squad weathered a season full of highs and lows. When the stakes were highest, the Panthers did what they needed to do to take home a title.

Head coach Tara Archibald, now in her 4th season leading the EIU program, credits her team’s closeness as a contributing factor to the team’s title run.

“Their chemistry is off the charts,” said Archibald. “Their drive and belief that they could make history in this program, and to see them carry that out, was just incredible to watch. They talked about this from day one – that [winning a championship] is what we want to do.”

To fully comprehend the value of the Panthers’ title run this season, it’s important to know the context of what the last few seasons have held for the program.

For several years, the Panthers jockeyed for position in the OVC standings. A 4th-place finish in 2017 was followed by an 11th-place finish just two years later. Winning their division, when the OVC was still split up in that way, could be followed by consecutive 6th-place finishes in the league as a whole.

When Archibald arrived in the summer of 2019, she took over a program that had won the 2011 and 2013 OVC titles, but had hit a years-long skid in the time since. She shaped the roster, adding some transfers for an influx of veteran talent and potential.

In 2021, EIU raised some eyebrows with their performance en route to a 7th-place finish in the OVC standings; that result set expectations entering the following year. But in 2022, those expectations weren’t met – in fact, the Panthers regressed, to a point, conceivably under the weight of expectations and goals.

Entering the 2023 campaign, one question loomed large: What exactly were the Panthers made of; which year had been the anomaly and which told the actual story of what EIU softball’s identity truly was?

Not only did this year’s EIU club answer that question, they answered it emphatically and resoundingly. A notion of “we’re here to stay” punctuated the message that the Panthers are a program on the rise.

One piece of evidence in that realm might be the team’s performance in the OVC tournament last weekend. Earning the #2-seed in line with their finish in the conference regular-season standings, the Panthers entered the conference tournament with the same season-long goal in their minds.

The Panthers never lost while in Oxford, running the table en route to a 3-0 record and a tournament championship.

“I felt like we played at a different level this week,” Archibald said following the tournament. “Our defense was really, really good – we played some incredible defense all weekend long. Olivia Price was so good for us all year long, but she was a different level of good in this tournament. Her game went to a different level; it war, by far, the best I’ve seen her pitch. And our hitters faced some really good pitching and were successful.”

One of seven softball programs making their inaugural NCAA tournament appearance this postseason, the Panthers alone can claim the path and the journey that got them where they are now.

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