Pitching-rich UConn the top seed and team to beat in Big East softball tournament

Laura Valentino became UConn’s head softball coach on July 3, 2019. It was already late in the recruiting season, so she hit the trail the next day, flying to Colorado for one of the big showcases of the summer.

There, a right-handed pitcher caught her eye: Elise Sokolsky.

“I wanted to have players that fit the personality of the program we were trying to build,” Valentino said. “What sold me on Elise, physically she was somebody that the sky was the limit on the mound, but what really sold me on her was her character. She wants to be a coach, and she talked about how much she wanted to be a student of the game and help this program become a national power.

“Those those words are key words I’m looking for in recruits. That made me really want Elise to be part of this program.”

This season, the freshman from Centerton, Arkansas, joined a team full of seniors and grad students at UConn and proved to be a rock-steady presence on the mound, going 19-5 with a 2.54 ERA as the Huskies rolled to their first Big East regular-season title since 1997.

Now Sokolsky, Meghan O’Neil (12-7, 2.98) and Marybeth Olson (5-3, 2.66) are poised to carry the Huskies’ postseason hopes into the Big East Tournament starting Thursday. Top-seeded UConn takes on No. 4 DePaul, the host school, in Chicago at noon. Second seed Butler lays No. 3 Villanova in the second game.

The Huskies (36-16, 20-4) clinched the regular-season conference title last Friday on Jana Sanden’s two-run single in the ninth inning to beat Villanova 4-3. It was UConn’s 11th walk-off win.

“I know the players were excited and overwhelmed with joy,” Valentino said. “What a way to do it in UConn softball fashion. There’s nothing like coming down to the last out of the game and winning on a walk-off. That’s the personality of this team, and I’m really proud. That’s step one, but our expectation is to win the conference and that’s what we came here to do.”

UConn has a .280 team batting average and outscored opponents 275-173 but having multiple pitchers they can trust will be the key to the Huskies’ chances of surviving the double-elimination tournament and capturing the conference’s automatic NCAA bid.

Sokolsky, who led the team with 146 innings pitched and 167 strikeouts, was 12-1 in conference play.

“What’s unique about Elise is she is someone who can be challenged,” Valentino said. “You can ask her to step up and do better and that’s awesome as a coach, to be able to go up to a kid and demand more of them, challenge them to do better and they respond. Elise has responded all year and gotten better and better as the year has gone on. She just wills the ball by people.”

O’Neil, a junior lefthander, led the team with 21 starts and struck out 119, walking 28, in 115 innings.

“Meghan started off the year throwing well, then kind of hit a little bump in the road,” Valentino said. “Seeing her throw [much better] the last couple of weekends, she never let up work ethic-wise and constantly wanted to know what she could do better to help the team succeed.”

Righthander Olson, a graduate student, leads the team with three saves. She uses more off-speed pitches than her teammates and has been effective as a starter and reliever with 66 strikeouts in 51 innings. A starter earlier in her career, she threw a no-hitter in 2020.

“She’s a courageous kid who has been through a lot in her career, medically,” Valentino said. “It’s so neat to see a fifth-year senior performing in these last couple of weeks. She complements our staff really well and it speaks volumes about her willingness to buy into the role of being a closer. Overall, the staff wants to see each other do well and they put the program first.”

Valentino was studying matchups earlier in the week with her staff to decide how to roll out her three pitchers. The Huskies arrived in Chicago on Tuesday.

UConn played in eight NCAA tournaments in 13 years between 1989 and 2001 but has not been back since. Reaching an NCAA regional in 2022 would be a milepost for Valentino, 74-41 since taking over the program. Last May, UConn was one win away, losing a doubleheader to Villanova on the final day of the Big East Tournament in Storrs.

“At the beginning of the year, that was a lot of the talk, ‘This happened last year,’” Valentino said. “Now that we’re the regular-season champs, the focus has shifted to taking it one game at a time and playing our best version of UConn softball. I really feel great about our team focusing on us.”

Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com