Bradley softball’s Sarah Willis became the 11th head coach in program history this offseason. Without a game with the Braves under her belt, her care for her players both on and off the diamond seem to set her up for a successful first year.
Willis inherits a team that went 26-26 overall and 13-14 in conference play last season while also welcoming back preseason all-conference selection sophomore Abbott Badgley. For her first year at the helm, Bradley is projected to finish ninth in the new-look 12-team league.
With an immense softball background from playing the sport since third grade, Willis eventually began her career at the collegiate level where she excelled at Texas Tech. As a pitcher for the Red Raiders, Willis finished with 22 career wins and 298 strikeouts in 113 appearances.
After graduating, she wanted to further her education in Sports Psychology and some advice led her to become a coach.
“I was doing my masters in Sports Psychology so I knew I wanted to work with college athletes or professional athletes at a certain level and my now-husband, but boyfriend at the time, Joe, who was going through the sports medicine program at [Texas] Tech, encouraged me to consider coaching because I was helping out with the program and saw how much I enjoyed it,” Willis said. “Funny enough, I didn’t think of it myself, it took him to do that so I guess 13 plus years later this is all his fault.”
Coaching ever since her role as a student assistant at Texas Tech in 2008, Willis has made stops at Princeton, Southeast Missouri State, Dayton and Bowling Green before becoming Bradley’s new leader.
One of the reasons why Willis has been so successful is her ability to create a locker room environment for the players that makes them all feel accepted and cared for.
“She really makes a point to make sure that you’re good,” Badgley said. “If we have any free time you know she’s always talking to us about our lives [and] our school work. She knows we are people outside of just the athletes that we are.”
The relationship between the coaches and the players has been a key factor in ushering in a new era for Bradley softball.
Willis took on an interesting task as she came into a team that had lost some key seniors but for the most part retained the roster. Her focus was to understand her pieces and learn from them.
“When I first met her she individually Facetimed every single player on the team and the majority of that conversation wasn’t even related to softball, it was getting to know us as people getting to know kind of how we do things in our personal lives outside of softball,” Badgley said.
Being a head coach is a difficult job as is, but Willis has the recent success to know what it takes to win. Her Falcons broke an 18-year hiatus by making the postseason with their 34-21 record last season.
“This program is pretty special I think because I’ve never walked into a situation with a group of obviously talented athletes but just amazing and talented people,” Willis said. “They all are very strong individuals when it comes to who they are as people.”
Willis has zeroed in on her player’s characters off the diamond and it may be because of what she perceives as a changing landscape in how athletes want to be coached.
“Athletes today are looking for more personal relationships to where they know that their coaches care about them as people first and that certainly helps to enhance communication on the field and to help everyone know where everyone is coming from with their story and their background,” Willis said.
Taking her philosophy of a player-first mentality to Bradley was a good idea especially in the age of the transfer portal where there are no guarantees that players will stay. However, the team wanted to stay together and loved the new atmosphere.
“Everyone on the team chose this school for more than just the coaches and we really do love it here,” Badgley said. “We love the close-knit family that we have, we love the atmosphere that we have, with the athletic department and with the academics side of things. I think that leaving that would’ve been very difficult.”
After leading Bowling Green to one of its most successful seasons in 2022, Willis decided to leave and pick up the reins for Bradley softball.
“I definitely felt the love for it and the care and the enthusiasm for the sport of softball so that was really important to me,” Willis said.
Heading into her first year in the MVC, her goal is, by no surprise, to win the conference. In the future, Willis hopes the goal will evolve to winning consistently.
“With the Missouri Valley Conference, it’s a much tougher overall conference than the Mid-American Conference was and I really recognized that,” Willis said. “In terms of success on the field, we certainly are gonna see our success this year and over the long term but we’re looking to sustain that success [and] not just win every once and a while.”
