This past summer, Leigh Ross thought that the 2008 recruiting class was all sealed up.

After securing commitments from seven different recruits, Ross, the head coach of the Syracuse softball team, was in Las Vegas. Ross sat in the sweltering 110-degree Las Vegas heat, content with her incoming freshman class.

Or so she thought.

‘Lacy Kohl caught our attention, and I had coach Kyle (Jamieson) watch her last game,’ Ross said. ‘I was up on top of this huge 20-field complex, and then coach called me. Then I trucked down to find her, and I was able to catch her, but it was like a mad sprint through 110 degrees.’

Not soon after, Ross and Jamieson secured a commitment from Kohl, the eighth for the class, and just one of what Ross and Jamieson refer to as a ‘mixed bag’ of freshman.

Initially, Ross and Jamieson sought to fill three holes with this freshman class: pitcher, long infielder and first baseman. But as the months went by, Ross kept running across players she couldn’t turn down. Instead of three freshmen, like the coaches originally planned, eight of the 17 players on this year’s roster are freshmen. .

‘We are very happy with how this freshman class played out,’ Jamieson said. ‘We have girls from so many different places, so many different pieces to the puzzle.’

When speaking of the ‘mixed bag’ of recruits, the Orange coaches refer to the varying hometowns of the players and their different recruiting stories. This class – the first full class for Ross and Jamieson – began to take shape the moment they were appointed coaches.

During their tenure at Bowling Green State, the coaching duo had a trio of current SU freshmen on their recruiting radar: Jenna Caira, Stephanie Watts and Kelly Saco.

After taking over at Syracuse, Ross actively recruited the trio, despite a combined 4,155 miles that separate their hometowns of Richmond Hill, Ontario, Clovis, Calif., and Miami, respectively.

Caira, the native of Ontario, served as perhaps the most important signing for the coaches, as her recruiting process was unique from any other.

‘She had a lot of opportunities and her recruitment was tough for us, because here is a Canadian kid who lives in Switzerland,’ Ross said. ‘It was tough to communicate, tough to see her, but it was a good surprise, a good get.’

Though several of the commitments took months, or even a few years to secure, a few came along much faster than the coaches expected, as was the case with Watts.

‘Stephanie was a pretty prominent player in California, and we kind of stumbled across her out west,’ said Ross. ‘Once we got her on campus, she liked it way more than I thought she would. She knew right away on her visit that she was coming here. It was pleasantly unexpected.’

Seeing that this is Ross and Jamieson’s first complete recruiting class since arriving in Central New York, the pair’s recruiting philosophies are on display through the eight rookies.

One such belief that Ross and Jamieson hold is the importance of recruiting the East Coast, and especially New York.

‘It is always easy to find girls from California and Texas, and we even have girls from there in this year’s class,’ Ross said. ‘But when I first came here there weren’t very many girls from the East Coast, and we felt we needed to find girls from the East Coast, so we kind of changed our recruiting patterns.’

This belief system of recruiting the East Coast helped yield the eight players from different corners of North America, but despite the class’s geographical backgrounds, they have become a tight knit group of friends.

‘It is not often you see a team as friends on the field and off the field,’ Kohl said.

In Jamieson’s mind, this class’s diversity stems from one important thing that matters more than anything in the end.

Said Jamieson: ‘Every kid we had we are happy to have, but the bottom line is we want to get the best players we can into Syracuse, no matter where they are from in North America.’

aolivero@syr.edu

Published on February 25, 2009 at 12:00 pm