Sara Vanderford can’t remember who it was that broke the news to her.
She’d just landed at the Montgomery Regional Airport on May 10 as Texas State was making its trip to Troy, Ala., for the Sun Belt softball tournament. One of her teammates — she thinks it was senior first baseman Hailey MacKay, but she can’t say for sure — told her congratulations. Vanderford had no idea why.
Her teammate explained Vanderford was just named the conference’s Freshman of the Year.
“It was really cool to experience it with everybody together and be able to find out when I was with my team,” Vanderford said.
Her hazy memory is indicative of what this season has been like for the second baseman. Nothing seems like that big of a deal in the moment to her. She usually realizes it was after the fact.
Vanderford knew she was capable of hitting a walk-off double to help the Bobcats seal a 7-6 win over Texas A&M on March 11. But looking back on the year, she didn’t know she was capable of swinging for the second-most doubles in the league in a 50-game season.
The second-year freshman has racked up 16 doubles, 12 home runs, 111 total bases and 45 RBIs with Texas State in 2021 — she ranks in the program’s top six for a single season in each category. Her .771 slugging percentage leads the Sun Belt by far — the gap between Vanderford in first place (.771) and Coastal Carolina’s Mackenzie Beyer in second place (.689) is bigger than the difference between Beyer and UTA’s K.J. Murphy in seventh place (.608).
She was named the conference’s Player of the Week three times, selected to the All-Sun Belt First Team and All-Tournament Team and on Thursday, along with maroon and gold freshman pitcher Jessica Mullins, was voted to the National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA) All-Central Team.
“Doing well in games, I feel like that doesn't surprise me as much,” Vanderford said. “But whenever I look at the whole picture, yeah, it's pretty surprising.”
The Deer Park graduate wanted to be a Bobcat since her older brother, Josh, was a student at the university when she was six or seven years old. Sara started attending the team’s summer softball camps when she was in middle school and got the attention of head coach Ricci Woodard over the years.
Woodard recruited her to be a hitter. She was impressed by Sara’s confidence at the plate. But the rookie struggled a bit making the jump to NCAA Division I softball in 2020. She averaged .254 in the batter’s box during a pandemic-shortened season. Just six of her 17 hits went for extra bases.
“She's just so hard on herself. And she knows that. It would start affecting her next play,” former Texas State second baseman Bailee Carter said. “She holds herself to a really high expectation. But you know, it's a game of failure and so, we can't always be perfect. Freshman year, I think it's hard transitioning from travel ball and high school ball to college. It's a whole different game, pretty much.”
Carter and Texas State’s other upperclassmen reminded Sara throughout the year that softball is a team sport. No wins and certainly no losses were going to come down on any one player’s shoulders.
It’s something Sara’s tried to realize herself this year, even as Carter, who Vanderford called her “go-to,” moved on from softball after the end of the 2020 season.
“I found myself playing pretty selfishly like in the middle of (this) season. And you could tell. Like, the hit numbers went down, the errors went up, so you could tell. And then I think whenever I realized like, ‘OK, go back to it not being about you,’ it's just a different feel,” Vanderford said. “I feel like whenever that clicked, everything else has just been rolling.”
Vanderford's second go-around as a freshman has gone much smoother, as she’s more than doubled her hitting totals in several categories. Coincidentally, the Bobcats’ winning percentage jumped from .625 in 2020 to .760 in 2021.
The 24 games Vanderford played last year likely gave her an edge over some of the true first-year players in terms of what to expect. But in many ways, she’s still experiencing a lot of firsts this season.
For instance, she’ll play in the NCAA tournament for the first time on Friday at 6:30 p.m., when Texas State (38-12, 17-6 Sun Belt) faces Oregon (37-15, 14-10 Pac-12) in the first round of the Austin Regional.
“I think that those (second-year players) should still be considered freshmen because when you don't have to do this all the way till the end of May, it's tough to do that,” Woodard said. “When you just look at her (24)-game span last year, you know, she had a lot of ups and downs. And so, I wasn't sure that at this point of the season she would still be swinging the bat this well for us. And I think that's probably been the surprising part, is she's been able to kind of survive some of the slumps and come right back at it.”
Vanderford will have three more years of eligibility after the end of this season, her trophy case already stockpiled with laurels. What else does she want to accomplish by the end of her career?
“What other awards are there?” she asked.
