Carol Hutc

Carol Hutchins Breaks NCAA Wins Record

Carol Hutchins is the greatest winner in college softball history. Again. 

And this time the sobriquet should stick for a bit. 

Hutchins earned career win No. 1,675 in No. 17 Michigan’s 3-0 victory against Northern Kentucky on Friday in the Duke Invitational. That broke a tie with former Arizona coach Mike Candrea for the most wins in NCAA history. 

It’s not the first time that Hutchins broke the record for wins. In 2016, she passed former Fresno State coach Margie Wright, who previously held the record with 1,457 wins. Hutchins and Candrea then dueled for the top spot until the Arizona legend retired following the 2021 World Series. 

Hutchins also ranks 12th in all-time winning percentage among coaches who worked primarily at the Division I level. She led Michigan to the 2005 national championship, the first for any school from east of the Mississippi and the first for a cold-weather school. That is one of 13 World Series appearances, seventh-most in the NCAA. Michigan reached the best-of-three championship round again in 2015, taking eventual champion Florida to a decisive third game. The Wolverines have dominated the Big Ten during her nearly four decades, winning their 22nd conference championship in 2021.

A standout shortstop at Michigan State, Hutchins is a bridge between not only softball eras but the past and present of Title IX and women’s sports in this country. She would be the first to point out, quite possibly in her familiarly gruff way, that celebrating her for an NCAA record ignores a generation of women who played and coached when the AIAW governed women’s college sports in the decade after passage of Title IX. 

Hutchins was among them, helping Michigan State win the 1976 AIAW World Series in Omaha. Far from the bells and whistles — or crowds — of the current venue in Oklahoma City, they played on a turf football field because rain in the area soaked the softball diamonds. 

“The only opportunity we had to win a championship was AIAW, and it was as important and as real to me and my teammates as today’s championship is,” Hutchins recalled several years ago. “And they don’t really count it. Before the NCAA, women’s athletics didn’t exist? It did exist. It was certainly not high profile, and the university didn’t really regard us, but everyone who was a student-athlete regarded themselves as an athlete and carried ourselves like athletes. 

“We were in pursuit of being great.”

When Michigan hired her as an assistant in 1983, even her beloved mom asked her when she was going to get a real job. She didn’t get to be a full-time coach back then, instead forced to split her hours between softball and clerical work in the athletic department. 

When she took over as head coach in 1985, there were 119 Division I softball programs. Michigan finished with a winning record. In 2021, there were 292 Division I programs. And Michigan finished with a winning record. And they had a winning record every season between the two. As the sport grew and flourished, Michigan went from an outpost in the softball wilderness to fending off the encroaching sprawl of the SEC and Big 12. And still Hutch’s teams kept winning — 1,675 times, as of Friday night. 

From Alicia Seegert, her first All-American in 1986, through Jennie Ritter, Amanda Chidester, Sierra Romero and now Storako and Meghan Beaubien, she reached generation after generation of women in a changing culture without ever seeming to deviate the slightest bit from her own philosophy of life and softball.

You can tell the story of softball without Hutchins, its past or its present.

Nor would it have the future it does without her.

Hutchins shows few signs of moving on. She told D1Softball this winter that the challenges of the pandemic helped her focus on the moment and, as a result, she’s “never loved being in the dugout more.” With at least another season of All-American pitcher Alex Storako and a talented freshman class now learning the ropes, she should be able to comfortably pad her record. 

Oklahoma’s Patty Gasso, her closest active challenger, remains more than 300 wins behind. 

With the win, Michigan improved to 6-4 this season. The Wolverines play No. 9 Duke in their second game Friday, before facing the same two teams again Saturday.

The record might have come a night earlier, if not for a flight delay that left Delta in a doghouse that generations of Wolverines have learned is best avoided. Travel issues eventually forced the cancelation of a scheduled game against Army.