Next in our journey to preview the Mountain West softball teams is the Fresno State Bulldogs. The Bulldogs are going through a scenario all too common in the mid-majors: losing your head coach to a power conference school. Coach Stacie May-Johnson, who just led the Bulldogs to the brink of a MWC title before falling short in the championship game to San Diego State, left Fresno State in the offseason to become the head coach at her alma mater of Iowa. Strangely, though, this honestly may have been for the best, as May-Johnson’s tenure in Fresno had been a bit disappointing.
The Bulldogs have consistently been one of the best softball programs in the country ever since the team was founded in 1978, making it to four Women’s College World Series championship games in the 1990s under legendary skipper Margie Wright, winning it all in 1998. Wright retired in 2012 with a 27-year average winning percentage of .742 and a total win count for the Bulldogs of 1,294, which is fourth all time with a single team. The Bulldogs’ next two head coaches—Trisha Ford and Linda Garza—did admirable jobs at keeping the tradition of excellence going, combining for an average winning percentage of .662.
All of this had been done without ever finishing a season with a sub-.500 record, a stat which changed in May-Johnson’s very first season, one where the Bulldogs crashed into the basement with a 2-14 start and a 19-36 record. May-Johnson rebounded her record to a mark of .514 before leaving for Iowa City, but that mark is still a far cry from that achieved by her predecessors…