Powered by Kansas players, Butler softball reaches fifth straight NJCAA tournament
The Butler Community College softball team has become a national juggernaut with a backbone of Kansas-born players.
On Monday, the Grizzlies added to their recent streak of dominance with two straight routs of Trinidad State Junior College, by a combined margin of 32-7, to win the Plains District Championship and advance to their fifth straight NJCAA national tournament.
During that five-year run, Butler has won a pair of national championships (2016 and 2017) and won 92.4% of its games with a 256-21 record. And the Grizzlies have done it primarily using Kansas recruits.
“You go back to our first national championship and look at how many Kansas kids started on that team, it’s a point of pride for us,” Butler coach Doug Chance said. “We want to win with Kansas kids, so we go hard after Kansas kids, then we supplement that with out-of-state kids. But we’re Kansas first.”
Butler (48-2) was ranked No. 2 in the final NJCAA softball rankings and will enter the national tournament on a 45-game winning streak, the second-longest in program history. The Grizzlies will learn their seeding in the national tournament, which begins May 25 in Yuma, Arizona, later this week.
Once again, Kansas products lead the way.
Maddie Redman, a Blue Valley Southwest graduate, is the only No. 1 starting pitcher in the country with an undefeated record (24-0) and she ranks first in the country in ERA (1.07) among pitchers who have thrown at least 100 innings this season.
Butler has three hitters that rank in the top five nationally in batting average are all from Kansas — Derby’s Madi Young (.564), Rose Hill’s Emily Adler (.552) and Olathe Northwest’s Shayna Espy (.549). Young also leads the country in stolen bases (58), while Espy ranks 11th nationally in runs batted in (79).
Other Kansas products who are key players for Butler include Mariah Wheeler (Derby), Brooke McCorkle (Wellington), Sydney Adler (Rose Hill), Kelcie Kippes (Rossville) and Gentry Shepherd (Goddard).
Butler has the No. 2 offense in the country with a team batting average of .442 and the best pitching staff in the country with a team ERA of 1.88. With that combination, Chance sees many similarities between this Grizzlies team and their two past championship teams.
“I think we’re similar to the 2016 team in a lot of ways and we’re similar to the 2017 team in a lot of way... when we’re healthy,” Chance said. “We’ve been a little banged up recently, but I think we’ll be good to go by the time we get to Yuma. I think when we are 100%, we have as good of a pitching staff as anybody in the country.”
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