By TEDDY ALLEN, Journal Sports, Written for the LSWA
Baylor softball coach Glenn Moore is by the baggage claim in Dallas, not an unusual place for a coach in the South to be, but he finds himself in an unusual spot.
He’s been asked to name a moment that stands out for him in the standout career of pitcher Britni Sneed Newman, voted by fans of LSU’s Tiger Rag Magazine as the program’s best-ever player and now one of the newest members of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.
Moore recruited her relentlessly — “Wrote her every other day, if not every day,” he said — signed her, and coached her the first two seasons of her storied LSU career, one littered with more awards and titles and hardware than you can shake a softball bat at.
Her entire career seemed to be One Big Moment. No way you can pencil in a single point in time, since her whole career was a repeat of one thing: winning.
“Tough to think of just one because she didn’t lose,” said Moore, who has had Newman by his side now for 19 seasons as Baylor’s highly successful pitching coach, and more recently as associate head coach. “She always won … To say that you can’t think of a specific time when you thought ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her better’ says a lot.”
“She dominated the SEC when she was playing,” said Yvette Girouard, Newman’s coach at LSU during the righthander’s final two seasons. “With somebody like that on the mound, you always felt you had a chance to win it all.”
To put it in a glove shell, Newman put LSU softball on the map, pitched the program to its first Women’s College World Series, vaulted the program to the perpetual WCWS contender it has become. She came to a program only three years old, a program that had been dropped 15 years earlier.
She came to town, and LSU softball has been impossible to ignore since.
To list her many awards and all her deserved and earned recognition, it might take the invention of two more alphabets and another set of numbers. Consider, if you can take a deep breath, all of this from her 1999-2002 career:
* Two-time first-team All-American;
* Four-time first-team All-SEC pitcher;
* First LSU softball player to be chosen for the school’s athletic Hall of Fame in 2009;
* Two-time finalist for USA Softball Player of the Year;
* SEC Player of the Year in 2001;
* SEC Pitcher of the Year in 2002 and SEC Tournament MVP in 2001 and 2002.
* Produced a career record of 120-25 with a microscopic 0.89 ERA;
* Helped pace LSU to a 230-45 record during that time, including at least 56 wins in each of her four seasons (59 in 1999 and 2002);
* Helped the Tigers to a third-place finish in their first Women’s College World Series appearance in 2001, highlighted by her striking out a then-SEC record 19 batters in a 13-inning, 2-1 win over Oklahoma.
On and on it goes. Sort of ridiculous, really.
A player raised in Houston who earned prep All-America honors at Cypress-Fairbanks High, she held a lifelong dream of going to Texas A&M. Except the Aggies said they didn’t need a pitcher.
Error.
Newman decided she wanted to be a Tiger, an opportunity to make her mark and do something no one else had done.
So … she did.
She’d put on her uniform the same way. Every time. Catcher Jennifer Schuelke would braid her hair. “If you look good, you feel good, right?” she said.
And when she got the start in the circle, she’d warm up the exact same way, every time.
But it wasn’t superstition that made her an LSU legend. It was her mix of talent and her two secret weapons that made her so fierce in the circle.
One, she developed a change-up before her junior season that “put her in another stratosphere,” Girouard said, and two, “she was one of the most fierce competitors I’ve ever been around. To be such a kind soul off the field … She separated life and softball.”
“She was the complete internal mix,” Moore said, “with a ton of talent.”
Photo courtesy LSU Athletics