Her final postgame handshake line at Beckham Field complete, Joyce Compton walked across the diamond to fetch the yellow softball lying between third base and the pitcher’s circle.
“Being around coach, she doesn’t make anything about herself,” said associate head coach Adrianna Baggetta, who played at USC from 1998-2002.
Compton, the winningest coach in South Carolina athletics history, declined to speak the media after Wednesday night’s 4-3 loss to Coastal Carolina, but the tears and words of her players after the game in right field as she was handed two dozen roses — one for each of her 24 years of coaching at USC — did all the talking that was needed.
On paper, it was a night of could’ve and should’ve for the Gamecocks. Two of the four Chanticleer runs scored off of errant balls that left the playing field. Several offensive opportunities went to waste. The storybook ending that looked to be developing when Laura Mendes hit a two-run shot in the bottom of the seventh to pull the game back to within a run never got written.
“I wanted, more than anything, for our team to get that win for coach tonight, because she deserves it,” senior captain Lindsay Walker said, her voice trailing off.
Along with Walker and Compton, it was the final home game as well for senior outfielder Adele Voigt. With Walker sidelined with injuries, Voigt was the lone senior on the field Wednesday night.
“Going out with [Compton], it’s really hard to come off a loss like that,” Voigt said.
But when the team got together with their departing leader afterwards, the sting of the loss was replaced with an outpouring of admiration and emotion. Several players spoke, but starting pitcher Ashley Chastain delivered some of the most poignant words, thanking Compton not for making her and her teammates better athletes, but better people.
“Coach just makes you a hard worker,” Walker said. “She’s instilled so much in me in my four years here that’s going to go with me for the rest of my life. It goes beyond this field, beyond this game tonight, what she does for us. She just makes us better people. She really does.”
Compton’s retirement was considered to be an upcoming thing to most around the program, but the players all said they were shocked when they learned.
“It’s something that’s always, you know, is in the back of your mind, but it’s not something you think was really going to happen,” Walker said. “Then it happened, and we all just kind of stood there in shock when she told us.”
Compton first broke the news to the team after this past Saturday’s 8-4 win over Mississippi State, Carolina’s lone SEC win this season.
“I didn’t see it coming,” Voigt said. “Saturday, right after the game, she kind of said it as a joke. I kind of had to do a double take. I think it caught everyone off guard. It’s still sinking in, even after tonight, and it’s still going to be sinking in.”
As the players exited the field and headed home, they left confident that Compton, if she didn’t already know, knew just how much they appreciated her.
“I think she knows deep down how we feel about her,” Voigt said. “She’s a great coach. She’s a great person. She makes you want to be a better person.”