By Justin Zackal
Softball will continue at Bethany College without Jan Forsty coaching, despite weather disrupting the schedule after she announced earlier this month that she would retire from coaching following the 2018 season. The weather was just a coincidence — or was it?
“God, she is punishing me, isn’t she?” Forsty joked on a conference call with PAC coaches who told her the bad weather this season was causation, not correlation, to her April 4 retirement announcement. “(God said), ‘Forsty, you’re leaving so we’re going to make it rain and snow and hail and everything else.’”
Spring eventually arrived at Bethany just as it did the last 31 seasons since Forsty first started coaching the Bison softball team in 1987, but next year a new, yet-to-be-determined softball coach will take over as Forsty will remain at Bethany and focus solely on her other duties as professor and chair of the Physical Education and Sports Studies Department.
“It’s not like I’m leaving Bethany and moving to California or something,” said Forsty, showing that she’s undeterred by the weather. “I’m still sitting in my same office but I’ll miss the family atmosphere with the team and standing at third base and the excitement of the game. That’s what I’ll really miss.”
What Forsty won’t miss resulted in her decision to stop coaching.
“I’ve been doing both academics and softball for a very long time and both jobs have become increasingly demanding to the point where it’s almost impossible to do both of them,” said Forsty, who has 50 students within her department and is teaching 17 credit hours this semester. “It’s not fair to my students and at the same time it’s not fair to my athletes.”
Forsty also mentioned the increased demands on recruiting, which metaphorically for a college softball coach is like exhausting time windmilling high school players around third base only to see many of them choose different base paths and different homes.
As one of only 15 coaches in NCAA Division III history to win 750 career games, including more than 680 wins at Bethany, Forsty transformed the Bison softball program to unprecedented success:
-Forsty led Bethany to 12 PAC titles, more than any other school, including six straight from 1999-2004;
-She was named PAC Coach of the Year 10 times; and
-She led Bethany to four NCAA Championship Tournaments, including the 2002 team that posted a 32-10 record, won the Central Region and advanced to the NCAA Division III World Series.
The endgame in her career, however, is a game of Catch-22. The reason she stayed at Bethany so long is also the reason she is retiring from coaching.
“I had the ability to do more than one thing: I was a coach, a professor and an administrator,” said Forsty, who also previously coached field hockey, volleyball and was the athletic director at Bethany. “Usually midway through a professional’s career you have to decide what you want to do; you have to pick one of those three. Bethany let me do all three which is very unusual. I like doing all of it and being totally involved in the department. That makes a big difference.”
Forsty admits she isn’t happy about retiring from coaching, saying, “I love the game of softball; LOVE the game of softball.” But all along she’s known what’s more important than the tactical aspects of coaching.
“It’s about teaching values,” Forsty said. “It’s not how to throw a curveball and it’s not how to lay down a bunt. Those are nice things to teach, but it’s the teaching of life skills (…) that’s always been my No. 1 goal. I get to keep doing that here.”
And the game of life won’t be disrupted by late-arriving spring weather, no matter how much God punishes Forsty for her departure from coaching.
