From the Diamond to the Dugout

Nearly every day this February, Dana Roberts has made the trek across the river for softball practice, just as the senior has for the last three years. But when she comes out on the field now, she doesn’t lace up her cleats and start throwing warmup pitches. Instead, she takes a seat on the bench and takes a glance at the practice plan.

Roberts won’t be seeing any time on the field in her senior season. Instead, she’s embraced her new role as an assistant pitching coach.

“I still feel like I’m part of the team,” the senior says. “I’m just as invested in the team’s success—and especially the pitchers’ success—as I ever was before.”

For a player who spent the last five years of her career battling a nerve injury in her elbow that resulted in two surgeries and countless missed innings, the prospect of pitching through another season of pain seemed too much to bear.

So last summer, Roberts made the decision to hang up the glove for good.

“By the end of last season, it was just so painful, so frustrating, that I decided last June to just kind of throw in the towel,” she explains. “I’d given it my all—that was that. But I wasn’t ready to step away from the team.”

In September, Roberts and Crimson coach Jenny Allard worked out a plan—Roberts would stay with the team and use her experience to help guide a young pitching staff.

“She brings knowledge of each and every person on the staff,” Allard says. “She’s really invaluable in that role. She knows the game, she knows what it’s like to be out there. She knows how the pitchers really need to think and what their focus needs to be.”

After a standout career at Ramona High School, outside of San Diego, Calif., Roberts arrived at Harvard in 2006 ready to make an impact. And the rookie did just that, showing no lingering effects of her first elbow surgery, as she tied the Crimson single-season record with four saves.

Roberts saved her best pitching for the stretch, hurling 28-straight scoreless innings in April and recording both the division- and Ivy League Championship-clinching wins.

But the injury returned. Roberts went through another surgery during her sophomore year and would never pitch a full season again.

“Sophomore year, I didn’t pitch at all until spring break, and then I came in and pitched basically just the Ivy season and ended up having a good season,” she says. “[I] didn’t pitch at all last year until about spring break, and came in, and it had just gotten to the point where I knew that physically, even if I [was healthy] enough that I would be able to pitch, I wasn’t going to be effective out there on the mound.”

But the experience Roberts gained mentally—both as a reliever and battling through pain—makes her particularly suited to her new role as a coach.

“I had to rely on my mental game a lot,” she admits. “So I feel like…I’ve been able to help—especially [freshman] Jess Ferri and [sophomores Rachel Brown and Julia Moore], the younger pitchers—develop their mental game a little bit, kind of have a much more intelligent approach than in the past where there wasn’t as much communication between the coaches and the pitchers.”

That added mental dimension will be crucial to the team’s success this year, as Allard is asking a trio of young pitchers in Brown, Ferri, and Moore to step up and shoulder a large portion of the load on the mound.

The pitchers have already begun to see the benefits of Roberts’ work in practice.

“She’s been so much help, because she provides a really critical and analytic eye for us,” Brown says. “I’ll be working on a pitch, and she’ll see things that I don’t think of.”

But Roberts’ influence is not limited to the team’s young hurlers.

“I’m just so glad that she stayed with us, because she may not realize this, but we need her so much,” says co-captain Margaux Black, also a pitcher. “She has the best eye out there, because she’s not pitching, she’s not focused on herself, but she can focus on everyone else.”

“It’s definitely helped me personally, and just having her there next to me—it’s comforting,” Black continues. “She’s my teammate, she’s also my roommate, we’ve gone through this whole thing together.”

During practices, Roberts focuses solely on the four pitchers—running workouts, working on situational awareness, taking notes, and debriefing after scrimmages.

And Roberts makes her hybrid role as a coach and teammate an advantage.

“Dana has turned an injury into the best thing for the team,” sophomore shortstop Jane Alexander says. “They have so much trust in her because she’s a teammate, and so it really helps our staff to have someone they trust and respect helping them to get better.”

Having had a taste of the coaching experience as an undergrad, Roberts sees it as a path she may someday follow—a proposition Black heartily agrees with.

“I’ve always enjoyed giving pitching lessons and instructing—I get a lot of pleasure out of that,” Roberts says. “And this has been really rewarding for me, using my knowledge to help the rest of the team. It will probably be a while until I have any freedom to do that, but somewhere down the road I’ll probably end up coaching.”

But for Roberts, that decision lies far in the future. In the present, there’s just under a month before Ivy play opens—and with it, the last shot at a second Ancient Eight crown for Harvard’s six seniors.

Because when it comes down to it, whether she’s hurling strikes on the mound or making notes on the bench, Roberts just wants to do what she can for her team.

“Surprisingly, once I made the decision to stop pitching, everything got a lot easier,” she says. “[Once I] was able to throw myself into it knowing that my goals for the season have changed and the game path that I’m trying to make has changed—it’s actually been really rewarding.”