Thursday, July 2, 2020

The Beauty of Sport, Part Five: Monica Abbott

Monica Aboott is a softball player with a trophy case full of medals from collegiate and international competition, most of them gold.


She attended the University of Tennessee, graduating in the class of 2007, and she played for the women's softball team for all four of her undergraduate years. 

As part of the U.S. national women's softball team, Ms. Abbott won the gold medal in the softball World Cup two consecutive times - in 2006 and 2007 - and two more consecutive times in 2009 and 2010. She was also on two championship teams at the Pan American Games, in 2007 in Rio de Janeiro and in 2019 in Lima. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where Ms. Abbott also competed, the best the team could manage was a silver medal, but that was by no means a shabby result. Whoever said, "You don't win silver, you lose gold" obviously never won a silver.


Ms. Abbott won herself something even bigger than a medal - a place in NCAA history. In her senior year at the University of Tennessee in the season's thirty-third game, she struck out her 500th batter of the season, which made her the first softball player ever in the history of her division (NCAA Division I) to record 500 strikeouts in all four years of her collegiate career.  

Perfect pitch. ;-) 

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