Lost perhaps to some softball observers amidst the excitement of the Women's College World Series was the news that University of Texas coach Connie Clark would not be returning to the Longhorns' dugout next season. Although the situation was portrayed as Clark choosing to resign, it was reported that the university had already decided not to renew her contract.
Clark is the only head coach Longhorn softball has ever known. A former WCWS-champion pitcher at Cal State Fullerton and assistant coach at Florida State, Clark was hired to lead the newly created UT softball program that debuted on the field in 1997.
Clark enjoyed great early success in Austin, as her Longhorn teams made the WCWS four times in the program's first 10 years (including in 1998, the team's second year of existence). Three of those appearances, in 2003, 2005, and 2006, occurred with pitching phenom Cat Osterman wearing the burnt orange.
Clark's overall record at UT would be judged as very good by most standards, I would think. However, in the ultracompetitive world of Longhorn athletics, in which former national-championship coaches Mack Brown (football) and Augie Garrido (baseball), and Final Four men's basketball coach Rick Barnes, were all either fired or eased out in recent years, I had wondered over the last few seasons how much longer Clark would last.
So, what do the hard, cold numbers say about Clark's 22-year stint at Texas? Drawing mainly from this past season's UT softball media guide, I plotted the team's annual winning percentage in Big-12 conference play. Conference slates would seem to be more consistent year-to-year than overall ones -- and thus a better barometer of a team's success -- as a team might schedule more difficult non-conference games in some years than in other years. (You can click on the following graphic to enlarge it.)
Notice first that there was a lot of year-to-year variation in the Longhorns' performance (plotted in burnt orange). For example, the bottom dropped out of the team's record in 2004, the year in which Osterman redshirted to concentrate on the Olympics. The program also hit major valleys in 2001 and '07.
To glean the larger trends, free from year-to-year volatility, I plotted a smoothed curve (in black).* Looking at the black curve, there's an initial rise from 1997-2001, followed by a flattening then slight decline in 2006. An even larger rise then takes place from 2007-2012. Both the unsmoothed (orange) and smoothed (black) curves then show a clear downward trend from 2013-2018, seemingly sending a message to Clark's bosses that the program was in decline. Interestingly, the Longhorns' decline in the past several years came as the Big 12 almost certainly became an easier league, due to conference realignment. Two of the teams the Big 12 lost (both to the SEC) were Texas A&M and Missouri, both strong softball schools.
It would be unfair to say the Texas program achieved little after Cat Osterman's final season. However, it is true that, in the dozen years of the post-Osterman era (2007-2018), the Longhorns made only one more appearance in the WCWS (2013) and got beyond the first round (regionals) of the NCAA tournament in only one other year (a super-regional appearance in 2012).
When "the eyes of Texas are upon you," a downturn such as Clark's Longhorns have endured in recent years is hard to survive.
When "the eyes of Texas are upon you," a downturn such as Clark's Longhorns have endured in recent years is hard to survive.
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*For you statistical nerds out there, I used a technique called loess regression, which can be implemented in Excel.