At the front of the ASU softball players lounge inside Farrington Stadium stands an easel holding an oversized notepad.
On the giant white notepad: a list, spanning two pages, numbered from one to 30.
The list is a reminder and a motivator. But more than anything, it’s a path — a path laid down by the 25 members of the team.
The carefully-constructed list displays the 2010 goals of the ASU softball team.
It seems hard to imagine that a team that won the Women’s College World Series in 2008 and came close in 2009 would have any other goal but a return trip to Oklahoma City, but coach Clint Myers knows there is much more to a season than the finish.
“Every team, including ours, has [goals to] win a conference championship and win a national championship,” Myers said. “But your season has to be about more than that, because only one team is going to have that happen.”
With that in mind, Myers left it to his players to decide what goals they would set, ultimately planning their path back to the capital of the Sooner state.
“These are all things the girls felt were important,” Myers said. “The coaches don’t play. It really comes down to what they feel is something they’re going to be able to manage and accomplish.”
During the most intense week of preseason practice, “Hell week,” the team was split into groups. Players were told to individually write down a goal and three ways to achieve it. The groups then reconvened and voted on the final list, sophomore shortstop Katelyn Boyd said.
“We kind of just sat down and shouted out opinions and what we thought we need to improve,” Boyd said.
A variety of goals comprised the final list. It included on-the-field goals like “Score 60 percent of our base runners” and “Be one of the top three hitting teams in the nation,” to universal goals like “Be team clutch” and “Take pride in who we are.”
While the ultimate goal may be athletic triumph, the team also set some off-the-field goals. The list included goals about maintaining physical fitness and raising the team’s collective GPA — which senior infielder/outfielder Caylyn Carlson said she hopes will be the highest of any ASU team.
The players decided to take a statistical approach to some of the goals, which Carlson said made them more measurable and real.
“Making it more specific makes it a more reachable goal,” Carlson said. “The little goals will get you where you want to go. Smaller goals will get us our bigger goal.”
Myers echoed the sentiment that a larger goal cannot be reached without first achieving a set of smaller goals, saying the small goals are “journey goals” and a World Series win is the “destination goal.”
“You can’t just say you want to win a national championship without having any kind of plan of getting there,” Myers said. “If you don’t attain the journey goals, there’s no way you’re going to attain the final goal.”
Myers said the team isn’t done with the list just yet. As the Feb. 11 season opener approaches, they will modify the list, add to it and review it, Myers said. The list will eventually be moved to a prominent location, serving as a constant reminder of what’s to be accomplished.
Myers, Boyd and Carlson all shared the idea that the team has to focus on its small goals in the present and not get caught looking ahead.
“We have to just live in the moment,” Boyd said. “You have to take care of one day to get to the next.”
While the list of goals staring at the players each time they come to practice is long, they all believe the goals are realistic. Especially No. 30 on the list, which reads in bold, capital letters: “BE A NATIONAL CHAMPION.”
Reach the reporter at tyler.lockman@asu.edu
