Courtesy of Brian Beard

During its spring break trip to Florida, the softball team (13–2; 1–1 NESCAC) won ten of its 11 games, marking its most successful trip in the last 19 years. For their first nine games, the Polar Bears were unstoppable. The team beat many high-ranked opponents, including Rowan University (15–5) 4–3 in extra innings, before falling to Worcester State University (4–8) in a close 11–14 loss.

The Polar Bears have been finding success with a more aggressive approach, be it batting or stealing bases. Ryan Sullivan, the head coach of the team for over 20 years, emphasizes that while the team has its unique set of strengths, it’s important to take strategy game-by-game and stay flexible.

“The fun thing when you get into NESCAC play is every game is its own little story,” Sullivan said. “It [has] its own narrative that writes itself while it’s being played. And so if you try to predict this team has that, or this team has that, you can get yourself into trouble really quickly making assumptions about how things will play out. You just got to go play the game.”

The Polar Bears began their NESCAC season with a doubleheader against Wesleyan University (7–6; 1–1 NESCAC) last Saturday, splitting the two games. The team came out of its first game against the Cardinals with a definitive 10–1 win bolstered by dominant pitching from Maddie Current ’26. The scoreboard seesawed in the second game before the Cardinals claimed a 12–13 victory.

Last year, the Polar Bears lost in the NESCAC semifinals to the Cardinals. After two consecutive years of being knocked out in the semifinal round, Current hopes to break the streak, but she also hopes the team focuses on their smaller accomplishments throughout the season.

“Big picture, being able to push through and win that second game would be a huge thing,” Current said. “But it’s the smaller things before that. If we can play as many games as possible and stay relatively healthy, the biggest thing for me in a successful season would be continuing to use the talent that we so clearly have and have everybody reach their individual goals as well as our team goals.”

When looking towards the rest of the season, Penelope Fong-Picariello ’27 emphasized not just maintaining a strong record and NESCAC results but also the parts of the softball experience that she will take with her beyond her time at Bowdoin.

“Obviously, record matters. I think [what matters more is] just being comfortable with ourselves, finding friendship and teammates,” Fong-Picariello said. “That’s more of the testament because softball is going to end, for me at least, in a year and a half, but we’ll always have those friendships and connections off the field forever.”

Current also said that softball requires a special type of confidence and teammate-to-teammate trust on the field, a skill that has proved valuable to her day-to-day life.

“[Softball] is such a team sport, but it’s also really individual,” Current said. “It comes down to the pitcher on the mound alone or the batter in the box. I’ve really appreciated learning how to function for your team in that moment. Even when it feels like maybe you didn’t get a hit, when that could have changed the outcome of the game, we’re all really focused on being like, ‘Okay, well, that wasn’t the whole game.’ Everyone has an opportunity, and things go how they go.”

Another aspect of softball that stands out among other sports, Current explained, is that instead of a clock counting down the time until the game ends, the game continues until the seven innings are played through.

“We’ve played several games that were over two hours long,” Current said. “It’s really never over until it’s over, and you always have a fighting chance no matter what. People always say that it’s a sport of failure. That sounds negative, but it is true. Any success that you have is somebody else’s failure.”

Sullivan similarly highlighted how softball teaches players how to grapple with failure both on and off the field.

“When you’re 35, you’re going to have a bad day at work and life goes on,” Sullivan said. “You’ve got to wake up the next day and go back to work. You’ve got to be able to skim across the waves and just keep moving forward. And if you can do those things, that’s going to be a really good attribute that you can take with you into life. That’s what we’re searching to do with our players on a daily basis.”

The Polar Bears play a doubleheader against Thomas College (6–9) starting at 4 p.m. today.