When Hofstra’s head softball coach, Adrienne Clark, arrived to the Pride’s dugout as the skipper in 2022, she was quick to get catcher Becca Vaillancourt to Long Island for the 2023 season after she found out Vaillancourt hit the transfer portal.
“I remembered her in her initial recruiting process, while I necessarily wasn’t a part of recruiting her, the organization that she played for when I was at Purdue, we were recruiting some people from,” Clark said. “I was already familiar with her play, and when she went into the portal, I recognized the name and reached out to her travel coaches who had nothing but amazing things to say about her. When we met and she came on campus, we had some pretty honest dialogue about what she was looking for. I knew pretty quickly in our in-person interactions that she was going to be an incredible asset to the program; the way she carried herself, her intuitiveness and her eagerness to work and put the work in is what stood out most to me.”
Not to perpetuate the cliché, but recruitment comes down to approach. There are athletes that would rather have the individual success over the team’s collective success; think of MVP awards over the World Series rings. Vaillancourt is all about the latter – when she transferred from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, she entered the transfer portal with one specific goal in mind.
“I knew that I could play in a better conference and play at a higher level, so I left wanting to compete for a championship,” Vaillancourt said. “I wanted to play on a team that had a shot at winning and going to a regional.”
A .316 batter at UMass Lowell across two seasons translated to a .313 batting average in her two years with the Pride, slashing .363/.409/.644 this season. She’s also added nine home runs to her credit, second-most in the Coastal Athletic Association (CAA). No, we’re not going back on what we said about her game not being about personal achievements.
“I wanted to hit five home runs when I got here and I did that, but I also wanted to win a championship and we did that as well,” Vaillancourt said. “Since this year is my senior year, I wanted to leave it all out there on the field. This is probably the last time I’m ever going to play softball. Knowing that, I don’t want to have any regrets at the end of the day and that I went out there every game and did my best.”
Vaillancourt’s batting average has jumped roughly 60 points from her first year in 2023 to this season in 2024, and it’s thanks to regular dates with the batting cage in her pursuit of a perfect swing.
“I think I hit off a tee every single day [in the offseason] or was in a cage with my dad throwing me front-toss,” Vaillancourt said. “I knew that there were big shoes to fill after losing big bats in our lineup from last year, and I knew I had to step up, so there was some pressure-slash-motivation. If something didn’t feel right one day, I would fix it the next and make little adjustments that would add up over time to make my swing feel more like my swing. Somebody needed to step up, and I knew that I was going to be that person, I wanted to be that person. If that meant I had to hit off a tee over winter break and swing every day, then that’s what I was going to do.”
It all started in Tiverton, Rhode Island when Vaillancourt was six years old. With her dad being a huge baseball fan and her older brother playing baseball, she wanted to start playing as soon as she could so she could play with her brother. Catching, however, wasn’t the first menu item.
“I tried pitching once and I walked 12 batters, and my dad said, ‘I think you need to try something else,’” Vaillancourt said. “I wanted to be involved in everything; I always wanted to be touching and throwing the ball, so I’ve been catching since I was seven or eight years old.”
In short, Vaillancourt has a heavy bat, especially so if looking at this season. But what’s even bigger is something that doesn’t show up on the stat sheet: her bonds and leadership on the field. A pitcher’s best friend is their catcher, and Vaillancourt made it a priority to make unbreakable bonds with her pitchers.
“That’s the most important part,” Vaillancourt said, stressing the importance of trust and confidence between catcher and pitcher. “If there’s no trust or confidence between the two, then nothing is going to work. The pitcher isn’t going to feel comfortable, the defense won’t feel comfortable and then errors happen. That is, by far, the most important part of being a catcher is building that relationship with your pitcher; knowing what works, what they like to throw and when they like to throw it. If you don’t know those things, I don’t know if you could ever truly be in a good spot as a team.”
“Becca has a photographic memory where she can take things at face value without any emotion,” Clark said. “When she comes in after an inning or when we’re talking about pitches or she’s talking to the pitchers, she’s honest with them in her feedback of like, ‘Hey, that pitch didn’t really move’ or ‘Hey, you didn’t hit that spot. If you could get it a little more outside you would’ve been fine there.’ It’s this ability to not get emotional about it or not get on someone for mistakes being made; it’s more of a support system and even an acknowledgement of when she needs to be a little bit better.”
Catchers touch the ball on just about every play. Vaillancourt gained more of Clark’s trust to call pitches in the middle of the 2023 season.
“The way that she shows up every day, there’s never a doubt,” Clark said. “She is so consistent in her behaviors and how she shows up it makes it easy to trust. I have the tendencies as a coach, and I’ve learned this year that I kind of trust blindly a little bit – not all of the time, but I really do believe in our players. If they’re confident in what they’re doing, then it’s a win-win. Be confident making the mistakes, be confident succeeding, all of it. With her, it’s easy because there’s very few times that she shows up and doesn’t have a good mindset with her preparation. Very rarely does she show up unable to take feedback. When you show up with those behaviors and you’re consistent in them, it makes it easy for your coach and teammates to trust.”
Vaillancourt saw how her on-field presence could expand beyond the connection between herself and whoever is in the circle and took the dive of becoming a leader this season.
“I look back at myself freshman year and I remember what my upperclassmen were like. I get to be that same role model and mentor to the younger girls, but now I get to take what they taught me and build off of that,” Vaillancourt said. “Our freshmen are so great, they’re like sponges; they will take everything and soak it all in and it’s so great because I wasn’t like that my freshman year. Everybody is truly amazing.”
“She’s really turned a corner for herself,” Clark said. “I think she is leading through her physical play, and I’ve started to see her use her voice a little bit more and holding others accountable and supporting others in a different kind of way. I don’t know that that comes natural to her because she’s more of an introverted person in nature, so seeing her step out of her comfort zone and lead in additional ways outside of her play have been really impactful to our team this year.”
Now, it’s time for Vaillancourt to lock in. She came here to win a championship, and while this is something checked off on her to-do list, this year’s playoffs are around the corner.
Photo courtesy of Hofstra Athletics/Matteo Bracco
