Former Crowder coach, players discuss 1986 national title season

Millie Gillion took the microphone as she stood on the dirt of the infield on Crowder College's softball field Saturday as the program recognized its alumni and the 1986 national championship team.

She spoke about playing for the Roughriders, then coaching them and then spending time as the athletic director for the college. She considered it as "bleeding Crowder blue."

Players from the national championship team felt the same way.

"Oh, absolutely. It was family. This was a home. We became a family and still are in many ways. I consider them my family. We went through life events together," Bekki Turner said.

That was on display during the ceremony between games with upwards of 20 former Crowder softball players or coaches lined across the infield dating back over the course of the last four decades.

"It's a special place. That's why we came here. Meeting Annie (Westfall), meeting some of the players and you could feel this was a special place and this was a special team," Dana Jones (Geyer) said.

Annie Westfall was the coach of the 1986 team that took home the NJCAA championship trophy. She spoke about being able to see all of the former players and alumni back at their "home."

"Seeing them and knowing that my first groups were a part of building that and then how much success everybody's had, it's heartwarming. It brings back so many special memories too. It's fun to see it all come back together and just hear their stories," Westfall added.

"It's pretty special. It's nice to get to reunite with old teammates. That bond is always there with your teammates, even if you haven't seen each other in a long time," Jones said.

After the alumni recognition between games, the former players sat down for a cookout and talked among one another.

One discussion was about how things have changed. Westfall talked with spectators about the championship season and how there were limited resources to go around.

She believes there were three or four bats for the whole team to share and maybe just four helmets as well.

"It wasn't what we see now, which I'm so happy for. I'm so happy that it's grown like this. But you came here to play softball and you came here to go to school, and we made it work," Westfall said.

One player who really made a strong impact on that season was the late Michelle Chia. She was dominant in the circle, as she finished the season with a .29 earned run average and pitched 313 innings for the Roughriders and logged 39 wins.

She led the team to a 63-6 overall record and pitched every single game of the national tournament.

"She didn't lose. She had that extra little bit in her," Westfall said. "In that tournament, she pitched every game. That wasn't the plan, but we rode her as long as we could ride her."

One of Chia's former teammates talked about how important she was to the team.

"We had a bond that we didn't even have to speak words. We could just look at each other and we kind of knew exactly what was going to occur on the field," Lea Brown said. "Michelle (Chia) was the central part of that. ... It was an honor for us to be on the field with her at that time.

"It was an honor to play for Annie (Westfall), and Annie has meant so much to us."

Westfall noted that the record of 63-6 (91% win percentage) came in 69 away games. She said every time they were scheduled to play at home, they got rain and had to play somewhere else.

And then, in every tournament they played in, Crowder would lose the opening round and then find a way to fight back to win it — including the NJCAA tournament.

"What a great job. They never gave up," Westfall said.

She considered her gig at Crowder to be orchestrated "by God." She felt that he led her to the role right after graduating college, and she's thankful for that.

She had a friend going to school at Crowder who suggested her as a softball coach to the current softball coach who was also the basketball coach and didn't actually consider himself a softball coach.

Westfall was offered "room and board" and the position, and she took it.

"It turned out to be the best job I ever had," Westfall recalled.

The uniforms

Crowder used to wear a baby blue colored jersey with two stripes of yellow on the sleeves with a white stripe between them. That's the same jersey that the alumni members wore Saturday.

The current Crowder team also put on the replica jerseys for Game 2 of its doubleheader.

Gillion says those jerseys were actually handed over from the baseball team one year because the company the jerseys were ordered from actually got the order wrong, so the baseball team just handed them off to the softball team so it could reorder the correct colors.

Yellow was never meant to be a part of the uniform, apparently.