Allard Masters Lessons on and off the Field

A visitor to the office of Harvard softball coach Jenny Allard could guess correctly from the piles of papers strewn about her desk that she is a busy woman. The casual observer may also note from the smiling faces on the various team pictures adorning her walls that she has enjoyed her time coaching at Harvard.

But you’d have to dig around—in the back corner of the room, specifically—to find any evidence of Allard’s illustrious playing career in the sport.

“I’m not one to stick a lot of awards up on my wall,” Allard says, as she searches for a certain piece of hardware. “Ah, here it is.”

The plaque produced by Allard, though modest in size, certifies her selection as one of 17 women to the Silver Anniversary team at the University of Michigan.

“There are some tremendous athletes that have gone through Michigan softball, and to be considered one of them is just a tremendous honor,” Allard humbly admits.

Looking back through the history books, though, it would be difficult not to consider Allard one of the most influential players in the 25-year history of the Wolverine program. An All-American and Big Ten Player of the Year, Allard was at one point selected as both the team’s Most Outstanding Player and its Most Outstanding Pitcher. Allard graduated in 1990 in the top four all-time in 15 hitting and pitching categories and was named to the Big Ten All-Decade Team in 1992—quite an accomplishment for a sport only entering its second decade at the time.

And now, another decade later, Allard is the winningest active coach in the Ivy League and has the highest overall winning percentage in program history. The Crimson has finished in either first or second place in each of Allard’s eight years at the helm and the easy-going skipper led Harvard to its first of three Ivy titles and its first of two NCAA Tournament appearances. It would not be a stretch to consider Allard one of the nation’s finest coaches.

But statistics of success and accounts of accolades aside, Allard’s story is emblematic of the growth and evolution of softball in the past quarter-century. Her career parallels the rise of the sport’s popularity and its increased national profile. What’s more, as a coach in the non-scholarship Ivy League, Allard’s balanced philosophy and particular brand of leadership has translated to more wins on the field without corresponding sacrifices in the classroom.

There’s a reason that team pictures and article clippings vastly outnumber any awards on Allard’s walls—the accolades were, and continue to be, far from her main objectives of winning as a competitor on the field and as a mentor and teacher off of it.

Go East, Young Woman

Raised in Southern California, an area she describes as the “hotbed of softball,” Allard played many sports growing up, primarily focusing on softball and soccer. Asthma forced her to ultimately quit soccer in favor of softball, but looking back, that decision was probably for the best.

After various successes in high school and stints on the national under-18 and Junior Olympic teams, Allard found herself heavily recruited by a host of powerhouse programs in her home state. It was a visit to a fledgling program in the Midwest, though, that caught Allard’s fancy.

Allard settled on Michigan—a school that had yet to win a conference title and was far from the nationally successful programs of UCLA and Cal State-Fullerton—because, as she describes it, it “just felt right.” Landing Allard was a big coup for the Wolverines, as she was the first big-time recruit to leave the cozy confines of California to take a chance on a program out east.

The chance paid off for both Allard and Michigan, as the Wolverines soared into contention for the Big Ten crown on a yearly basis. And though Allard did not win a conference title at Michigan or make the NCAA tournament as a player (she would later make her first visit as Harvard’s coach in the 1998 tourney), her decision to leave California was significant.

For starters, it sparked Michigan’s (and the Big Ten’s) recruiting efforts and helped draw some of the nation’s premier talents away from the SoCal softball “hotbed.” Secondly, this dispersal of talent ultimately led to the increased national popularity of softball, which had until then been considered a second-tier sport in most parts of the country.

John Wentzell, who served as Harvard’s second softball coach from 1982-1988, points out that softball definitely evolved from being considered a secondary sport to a primary one during this transitional time in the mid-to-late 1980s.

“Most of our players were two-sport athletes with softball being the second sport,” Wentzell says. “Jen’s players have all been playing softball since Little League and their talent and dedication shows.”

In addition to the increased visibility and popularity of the sport, improvements in the game’s technology (livelier balls and bats, for instance) and the training methods of its up-and-coming athletes led to an explosion of offensive production that made the game more enjoyable to watch.

As Allard points out, the standards or success were much different when she played than they are now.

“People didn’t hit .450 when I played; if you hit .340 or .350, you were a phenomenal hitter,” Allard says.

Despite the explosion in production and the sport’s popularity, Allard believes that, all things considered, the talent level has remained constant, if just now more widespread.

“If you took the players now and put them in the game back then with the same equipment, you’d have a similar level of play,” Allard says.

Having shared the field with the likes of eventual Olympians Lisa Fernandez, Michelle Granger and Julie Smith, it’s hard to argue with Allard’s take. Then again, it is also clear that softball’s migration eastward and the diffusion and diversification of talent—a trend that Allard embodied in her own playing career—helped the sport catch on and grow at places like Harvard.

Coach Class

As Allard’s playing career has symbolized the rise of softball’s national popularity and its gradual evolution as a sport, so too has her coaching career come to symbolize the fundamental premise of Ivy League athletics.

As an assistant coach at nationally-ranked Iowa, Allard eventually grew dissatisfied with the growing intensity of sports and the imbalance between athletics and academics.

“I really didn’t like where I saw big-time athletics heading,” Allard says. “There was a lot of compromising of academics, a lot of focus on their four-year collegiate careers and nothing beyond that.”

Allard, always a good student herself and an Academic All-American in her last year at Michigan, decided to keep her eyes open for a more suitable opportunity to put her teaching skills to better use.

That opportunity came in the spring of 1994 when Allard saw a job posting for the Harvard head coaching position. Though initially unsure of the idea of applying to be a head coach, a few colleagues encouraged Allard to pursue the job.

Much like her campus visit that “just felt right,” Allard’s trip to Harvard that summer was all that was necessary to seal the deal. Allard became the fourth coach in program history in time for the 1995 season and began what she figured would not be a terribly long stint.

“I initially thought I would come in here, work for four years, build up the program, win an Ivy title, and then move on to somewhere else,” Allard says. “But I love the students and I realized it’s a blessing to work with such bright, motivated people.”

For someone who wants to be known as a good “teaching coach,” it seems like Harvard was the perfect fit for Allard after all. Bringing in a new generation of talented recruits from out West, Allard has been able to refine their abilities and create a dominant program in the process.

Tiffany Whitton, the team’s captain and one of its all-time best athletes, was one such player. She praises Allard’s keen ability to get the most out of the people she brings into the program.

“Her biggest strength is that she pushes her players to achieve their greatest potential,” Whitton says. “She really believes in her players’ abilities and tries to get her players to believe in those abilities also.”

But beyond the successes of her teams on the field, perhaps the most telling aspect of Allard’s tenure has been her focus on academics and mentoring off the field.

“She demands a lot of her team on the field and in class,” Wentzell says. “It is clear that her kids respond.”

A graduate in Psychology from Michigan, Allard has always been interested in how the things that she’s learned about human behavior can be applied to her job as a softball coach. To that end, she enrolled in the Graduate School of Education and received a Master’s degree in 1999. She is now finishing work on her second Master’s degree through the Extension School and hopes to apply what she’s learned in the classroom in her day job.

“I really want to use those classes to supplement my coaching in terms of learning some things to help my players,” Allard says. “The classes have definitely given me ideas to implement in practice with certain players.”

Allard also hints that her scholarly side may have a motivational impact on the study habits of her players.

“It’s nice when you take classes and your team sees you studying and doing work,” she quips.

Allard has also been a freshman proctor for the last eight years, extending her desire to serve as a mentor to non-athletes at Harvard.

And it is these extra bonuses that Harvard offers—what Allard calls a better “quality of experience”—that explain why a planned four-year stop has turned into a much longer stay. Allard seems happy with her decision and the continual challenge of building up a powerhouse program seems to remain an animating desire for her.

“There’s an underdog mentality that people pass to you coming into a game,” Allard says. “Then you get in there, give them a run for their money or upset them, or do other great things.”

“It’s the opportunity to create a lot of pride in the program,” Allard sums up.

Judging on the sustained success of the program under Allard’s tutelage, her intended goal of building pride in Harvard softball seems to have worked out for the best.

Count the standout Californian Whitton among the converted.

“I think that Harvard softball has all the necessary tools to be a dominant program in the East,” Whitton says, adding that a trip to the College World Series is certainly a future possibility.

Knowing Allard and her insatiable drive to succeed at all levels of the game—as a player, as a coach and as a mentor—don’t be surprised if Harvard follows through and pushes deep into the NCAA tournament one of these years.

And maybe—just maybe—Allard will finally decide to put that sort of well-deserved accolade up on her office wall.

—Staff writer Daniel E. Fernandez can be reached at dfernand@fas.harvard.edu.