Lifelong passion: Then & Now with Bridget McKay
Bridget McKay is in the perfect position to appreciate how she got there.
The 1990 Gonzaga Prep graduate is an assistant softball coach at UC San Diego, which just completed its most successful season with an appearance in the NCAA Division II playoffs.
It was quite an arduous journey considering that when she started it she was just a player with a passion for fastpitch softball, not a fastpitch softball player.
“We played modified pitch,” McKay said of her prep days. “You don’t get to windmill. In 1990 we went to windmill but no one knew how to do it.”
The Greater Spokane League was one of the first to switch to fastpitch, before it became a sanctioned sport, but it was too late for McKay.
McKay’s passion grew out of attending Indians’ baseball games with her father, Larry, and playing catch in the backyard with her old brother Patrick. She enjoyed playing so much she twice attended Jim Wasem’s baseball camps at Eastern Washington University in her quest to improve.
It added up to earning All-GSL honors but her softball-obsessed odyssey was just beginning.
An honor student, McKay chose to attend Creighton because of family tradition and academics – and because she had the chance to try out for the softball team.
She didn’t make it.
“Looking at myself now as a coach, when I go look at kids, I was a pretty raw talent,” she said. “They might not have wanted to take the time to make me a refined player. I understand.”
McKay stayed on as manager but that only fueled her passion more. She called Community Colleges of Spokane coach Jerry Skaife and he encouraged her to come home if she wanted to play.
“Being on that team gave me a chance to play the game, gave me my confidence back,” McKay said. “Jerry was awesome, both him and (assistant) Bill Johnson helped me become a better player.”
Washington was just starting its softball team and McKay walked on, the only sophomore among the 18 players.
The Huskies made the NCAA Tournament in their second and third year, with McKay a co-captain as a senior.
“I got a scholarship my last year, basically I just played because I loved to play the game,” she said. “When I was playing, you don’t really realize the big picture. But looking back it is pretty amazing we became good that fast. It had to do with our coaches.”
Teresa Wilson, now the head coach at Texas Tech, and John Rittman, now the head coach at Stanford, were the Husky coaches.
“They had a passion for the game,” McKay said. “They got the best out of us. We had some great athletes. I don’t think I’ve coached a team that worked as hard as we did.”
Current UW coach Heather Tarr was the only other walk-on to make the inaugural team, McKay said, and the Huskies have not missed the NCAA Tournament since.
UW made the College World Series championship game in 1996, the year after McKay graduated with a degree in botany.
“It felt like it was still my team since I was the only senior the year before,” she said.
McKay knocked around various jobs in Seattle after graduation. That included being a personal trainer, working for the Sierra Club, getting her MBA and interning with a national company, teaming with her brother for McKay Music and trying to get an online music business off the ground.
Her love for softball never waned and she returned home to start her coaching career, this time assisting Janet Skaife, Jerry’s wife, at CCS in 2001-02. When McKay’s boyfriend in Seattle, who is in the Navy, got shipped out, she shipped with him. At his stops she coached at Norfolk State and Charleston Southern. When he returned to the Seattle area, she coached at Olympic College for a year.
But in San Diego she’s on her own.
“I like this game, I’ve been in it six or seven years, I like the four-year atmosphere,” she said. “I want to be a head coach or coach at a higher level, go to the College World Series. The opportunity came open at UCSD. It’s the toughest Division II conference in the nation. … It’s time for me to establish my career.”
She’s been working on that for a long time.
“I look back and sometimes I wish I had that opportunity at a higher level when I was younger,” McKay said. “How good could I have gotten? But I have no regrets with the path I have taken.”
Which has been anything but fast.