Jenna Rodriguez doesn’t recall much about what should be her most memorable trip around the bases.
In one instant, amid the roar of a crimson crowd in Alabama, Rodriguez turned on an inside pitch and paused to watch it sail well beyond the fence, willing it to the right of the left-field foul pole.
In the next, she was screaming down the third-base line, soon to be engulfed by a wave of green and white.
“When that stadium went silent, that time just went by in the blink of an eye. It’s like it was on fast forward,” Rodriguez said of the moments following the most momentous swing in University of Hawaii softball history. “Do I remember running the bases? No. I just remember celebrating with my team. It went by so fast.”
The decade since Rodriguez stunned top-seeded Alabama with a walk-off home run to send the Rainbow Wahine to the Women’s College World Series has zipped by in similar fashion.
Saturday marked 10 years since UH’s 5-4 win in the deciding game of the Tuscaloosa Super Regional and Rodriguez’ homer — her second of that game — stands as the signature moment in a 50-16 season punctuated by the program’s lone appearance in Oklahoma City.
“I get a little bit emotional talking about it still,” said first baseman Amanda Tauali‘i, now an assistant coach at BYU. “It still feels kind of out-of-body in a lot of ways.”
Ten years removed, much about the spring of 2010 seems surreal.
The foundations were set in the fall of 2009 with senior captains Tauali‘i, Katie (Grimes) Profitt, Kanani (Pu‘u-Warren) Williams and Traci Yoshikawa establishing a culture and chemistry that would define the season.
“I did very little coaching,” UH coach Bob Coolen said. “I didn’t get in the way. I just made the lineups and we just ran with it.
“I’ve said this hundreds of times to a lot of people, that year everyone accepted their role on the team. No one fought it, no one bellyached, no one said ‘I should be playing.’ They all accepted their role and it worked.”
Power surge
The Wahine completed the nonconference portion of the schedule at a respectable 22-11 then tore through the Western Athletic Conference regular season at 19-1, racing past the NCAA home run record along the way. Their total of 158 home runs remains atop the NCAA record book, 24 clear of second-place Arizona’s 2009 barrage.
UH unloaded on WAC pitching to hammer 65 home runs in 20 league contests. They launched 39 in sweeping an eight-game road trip through light-air ballparks at New Mexico State, Utah State and Boise State.
“It was everyone,” said Kelly (Majam) Elms, whose nation-leading 30 homers in 2010 remains tied for the most hit by a freshman in NCAA history. “It didn’t matter who you were about to pitch to, somebody might hit a home run. … Once one went out we rallied around that and it was just in the culture, in the mind-set of the team. That was who we were.”
UH’s relentless lineup topped by Elms (.400, 30 HR, 60 RBIs), fellow freshman Jessica Iwata (.367, 17, 58) and All-America third baseman Melissa (Gonzalez) Pelkey (.394, 25, 60) supported a young but dynamic pitching rotation of sophomore Stephanie Ricketts (30-10) and Kaia Parnaby (19-6), a freshman from Australia.
“(Coolen) always talks about having a presence on the mound, and those two absolutely had one,” said Katie (Grimes) Profitt, UH’s four-year starting catcher. “(Ricketts) was so young but she was very easy to work with. She was very, very tough, she was unfazed out there. … And to have Kaia being a lefty on the other side, and also very polished in her international experience, they were an awesome duo and the heartbeat to get us there.”
Postseason odyssey
On graduation day back in Manoa, the Wahine dispatched rival Fresno State 14-3 in the WAC tournament final in Las Cruces, N.M., and were sent to Stanford, Calif., as the 16th seed in the NCAA tournament. The Wahine then swept through the Stanford regional to earn a trip to Alabama for the best-of-three Super Regional.
”We really got to embrace what we were doing and just enjoy the game of softball,” Iwata said. “I remember going from bus to bus, airport to airport and being in all the different hotels and then going to the park and just playing games. That’s like every kid’s dream, they don’t have to have school and just travel and play softball.”
Down goes No. 1
A Friday rainout pushed the series opener back a day and Alabama rolled to an 8-0 rout in the opener of a doubleheader. But the Wahine regrouped over the next half-hour. A grand slam by Iwata, coupled with Ricketts’ gritty seven outs in relief propelled the Wahine to an 8-7 victory to snap Alabama’s 28-game winning streak and force a decisive third game that Sunday.
A quarter landed on tails to give UH home-team honors for the finale (a rule change eliminating the coin flip was instituted the following season) and Rodriguez launched a three-run homer in the bottom of the first. Alabama ace Kelsi Dunne then stifled UH over the next five innings and the Crimson Tide took a 4-3 lead into the bottom of the seventh.
“I don’t even remember what happened in the top of the seventh,” Elms said, “but I just remember coming off the field and the energy in our circle prior to going into the dugout was like ‘we’re going to do this.’ There was fire in the seniors’ eyes like, ‘we are doing this right now.’”
Elms watched a full-count changeup drift off the inside corner for a leadoff walk, but Dunne recorded her 15th and 16th strikeouts of the day to bring the Crimson Tide within an out of a return to the WCWS.
“I remember standing in the third-base coach’s box after two kids struck out, Kelly was on first and I was preparing my speech, ‘It was a great run … ,’ ” Coolen recalled.
With the UA Softball Complex in a frenzy, Coolen watched as Rodriguez took a hack at Dunne’s 117th pitch and …
“Boom, had to change the whole speech.”
While Rodriguez’s blast caught just about everyone off guard, she had walked up to the plate determined not to get caught looking at a pitch to drive, particularly on the inside half of the plate.
“Especially with that tight of a game and that situation … you might not see any of your favorite pitches, so anything close to the zone I was going be super aggressive,” she said.
In the span of a sharp collective inhale, Rodriguez (along with pretty much anyone else watching in the park or on television) paused to see whether the ball would hold its line or bend to the left for a long strike.
“I knew I hit the ball as solid as I possibly could, I just didn’t know if it was fair or foul,” she said. “In that situation with the game on the line I wasn’t about to celebrate unless I knew it was fair.”
By the time home plate umpire Christie Cornwell pointed into fair territory, the celebration was indeed on.
“It was a blur and then a whole lot of jumping and screaming … and then chicken skin,” Iwata said. “It was an unreal feeling.”
On to OKC
The Wahine continued their roll in Oklahoma City with a 3-2 win over Missouri highlighted by senior second baseman Traci Yoshikawa’s go-ahead homer in the top of the seventh. The season would end with losses to UCLA and Arizona (the eventual finalists. Yoshikawa delivered UH’s 158th homer in the finale and was named to the WCWS all-tournament team.
But the Wahine had crafted an enduring legacy well before their nearly month-long postseason odyssey turned toward home.
Since 2010, only two teams from non-Power Five conferences have reached the WCWS (South Florida of the Big East in 2012 and Louisiana Lafayette of the Sun Belt in 2014) and Hawaii remains the last non-Power Five team to win a game in Oklahoma City.
“It was crazy. It’s still crazy,” said left fielder Alex (Aguirre) Gomez, who homered twice in OKC, the second capping a 17-pitch at-bat against UCLA. “I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
“It’s really humbling to see what has come of everybody after 10 years and how everybody is doing in life,” the UC Davis assistant added, “and it’s really cool that we have that one thing that will always tie us together. … We were the 2010 Hawaii softball team. We were that team.”
