University of Texas softball coach Mike White is fairly certain his New Zealand accent has softened after six years in Central Texas. Not that he’ll ever be mistaken for anyone from Hallettsville, which he most definitely isn’t.
“That’s true,” White told me. “But I’ve lost a little bit of it, you know.”
That faraway accent was the most distinctive thing about White when University of Texas at Austin athletics director Chris Del Conte lured him away from Oregon in 2018, after White had taken the Ducks to the Women’s College World Series (WCWS) five times in a nine-season stretch.
The coach’s mandate from Del Conte was to put Texas softball on the national stage alongside Oklahoma, UCLA, and other traditional powerhouses. That he did, and fairly quickly, leading the Longhorns to the championship round of the World Series in his fourth season. Oklahoma won the second of three consecutive championships that spring, but Texas was on the map.
This year, White and UT softball hope to take the next step. The 50–7 team is the top overall seed in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in program history, with number two seed Oklahoma (who defeated Texas in the Big 12 tournament) lurking as the ultimate test the Longhorns must pass to achieve their championship goals.
If Texas succeeds, it would represent an ever so slight changing of the guard. Until this season, Oklahoma had entered every NCAA Tournament since 2020 as the first overall seed. Texas also handed UCLA its worst-ever home loss, snapped the Sooners’ forty-game Big 12 winning streak, won the conference regular season championship, and ripped through last week’s regional tournament in Austin with three victories by the combined score of 26–2.
The Longhorns got a no-hitter from junior Mac Morgan in a 5–0 victory over Siena in the tournament opener, and came within four outs of another two days later when freshman Teagan Kavan delivered 5 2/3 hitless innings in a 7–0 clincher over Northwestern. In between those two gems was a 14–2 victory over Northwestern.
This weekend, the fun will really start, as Texas hosts a best-of-three Super Regional series against Texas A&M. Longhorns–Aggies would almost always be the storyline. Only this time, with a WCWS berth on the line, the rivalry is more of a footnote, as well as a rematch of last year’s regional in which Texas beat the Aggies twice before being swept by Tennessee in a Super Regional.
This year’s Longhorns have been so dominant that they’re the only team in the nation ranked in the top five in both pitching and hitting, scoring 8.16 runs per game (second nationally) and pitching to a 1.75 earned run average (fourth best). As White emphasized several times when we spoke, the Longhorns’ gaudy stats and superlative regular season guarantee them nothing in the NCAA Tournament, and the coach says there are still miles to go before they should even anticipate hoisting a championship trophy. But Texas appears to be close to a perfect team, and a young one at that, starting three freshmen and three sophomores most games.
One of those sophomores is Reese Atwood, who plays catcher and first base and has emerged this season as one of the country’s top players, with 22 home runs and a .433 batting average. That’s a dramatic improvement from a freshman season in which she batted .291 with 11 home runs. “I think she’s self-driven, and that’s what you’ve got to be,” White said. “And even though we play a team sport, it’s very much individual, and you’ve got to understand, ‘How can I help this team through my individual effort?’ She doesn’t take anything for granted. She’s out there working, always in the cages, always working on her game and wants to know more. And I love that as a coach.” Atwood is one of three Texas players batting over .400, including Ashton Maloney in the leadoff spot. The team is 18–1 since White shifted her to the top of the lineup.
But it’s four seniors White credits for the Longhorns’ stability and leadership. One of them is second baseman Alyssa Washington, who was injured for much of her first two seasons but worked so hard and set such an example in how she handled those setbacks that White named her the first team captain in program history. White praised Washington’s ability to “keep everything, you know, balanced—not to get things too big or too low, to be understanding, to be able to have that shoulder for someone to talk to, or the ear to listen to someone that’s got some issues or just wants to know what the experience is like.”
I asked if, after 57 games, he was able to describe his team’s identity. “I’ve asked the players that as well,” White said, “but I think our identity is about being able to play the short game, play the long game, and then have good defense and pitching. We’re also very gritty and close together. `Family’ is one of our words we use.”
He helped create some of that atmosphere with an offseason that included team-building visits to an escape room, group dinners at his home, and getting the players together even for seemingly trivial activities like carving pumpkins at Halloween. In the course of all that, plus months of practices and games, this Longhorns group forged a bond. “I’ve put it on them to get this thing going, to be peer-led, to be player-led,” White said. “I think they’ve taken that to heart, and they’ve kind of led that. So the seniors make sure the young ones feel like they’re a part of the team straight away and [they] share all the responsibilities.”
As for the moment when White knew he might have something special in this group, that was obvious. In April, Oklahoma, then the top-ranked team in the nation, came to Austin. The Longhorns had lost two of three the previous weekend at Oklahoma State, and dropping another series to the Sooners could have been an indicator that Texas’s talented young squad was not quite ready to compete with the defending national champions.
Texas lost the opener against OU, but then captured back-to-back 2–1 victories that sparked an eighteen-game winning streak. Oklahoma wound up getting a measure of revenge when it ended the Longhorns’ streak in the championship game of the Big 12 tournament, but Texas’s confidence would not be shaken. “We’d just come off a tough series against Oklahoma State,” White recalled. “We lost two out of three and got shut out in two of those games. Then we were able to kind of, you know, not score a lot of runs against Oklahoma, but we were able to play really good defense and have good pitching. I thought, ‘Well, we got a shot here if we can just continue to do this.’
“Oklahoma is a three-time defending national champion with ten seniors,” he said. “They’ve been there, they’ve done that, and they’re going to be at their home field pretty much [Oklahoma City hosts the WCWS]. I mean, you can say Norman’s their home field, but there’s going to be 14,000 people in Oklahoma City, and 12,000 of them will be OU fans. But there’s a lot of softball that will be played before that. They’re tough and they’re not going to go down easily.”
Back in 2018 when Del Conte was looking to hire a new softball coach in Austin, White’s success at Oregon put him on the Longhorns’ radar. One of the most persuasive recommendations for White came from Del Conte’s friend, former Arizona softball coach Mike Candrea. “He’s the best out there and would be a good fit for you,” Del Conte remembers Candrea saying.
The deeper Del Conte dug into White’s background, the more impressed he became. “In every one of our coaching hires, you’re going to expect them to be winners, right?” he said. “But it’s also about the culture, the type of person he is, and the type of fit. There are a lot of people that you can hire, but they’re just not right fits. And we really focus on fit—how you treat kids, how you treat your staff, the type of teammate you’re going to be in the building.
“You know, it’s interesting,” Del Conte added. “When he came here, he just was one step at a time. He has no panic in him. He just goes through it and says, ‘Okay, here’s how we’re going to build it.’ And he recruited players that understood who he was. He focused on building inside out. He’s really into the development of our team and spends an enormous amount of time on that.”
The story of White’s life and career sounds as if it could have been cribbed from a TED Talk. He played soccer and fast-pitch softball in his native New Zealand. When his dream of a pro soccer career died, he immigrated to the United States at eighteen to play fast-pitch softball. He became a superstar, winning “seventy games in world championship tournaments between 1990 and 2006, more than any other men’s pitcher in that period,” according to ESPN. “He pitched for eleven teams that won championships in the American Softball Association or International Softball Congress, and was named MVP of one of those organizations’ tournaments five times.”
These days, the closest White comes to playing softball is when he throws batting practice to his players, many of whom probably have no idea he was once a great player in his own right. He joined Oregon as an assistant coach in 2003 and got the head coaching gig seven years later. “The older you get, the further you get away from it,” he said. “Maybe some of the kids before or their parents had heard of me or whatever. But, you know, men’s fast pitch is kind of slowly dying and getting less and less prevalent. Even when I went to Oregon, a lot of them didn’t even know that there was men’s fast pitch.”
He’s careful not to sprinkle his coaching advice with stories of how they did things in his day. “You don’t want them to be, ‘Oh, here we go again,’ ” he said. “But I try to bring in some references from my experience and situations. And I do try to attract coaches with playing backgrounds. It’s always good when you can not only tell [players], but show them. I just got done throwing batting practice this afternoon and, you know, giving them a bit of a test. So it’s always good to be able to stretch them to another level.”
Del Conte was blunt with White about the expectations for coaches at Texas. “There’s no more expectations than I put on myself,” the coach said. “I want to win, and I’m kind of impatient. The players do feel it a little bit, but we say that Texas is not for the weak or the timid. There’s a slogan we have in our facility and a couple of places that says that. And when you step on the line, you’ve got to be ready to defend that.
“Pressure is not a physical thing,” White said. “It’s a mental thing. You’ve just got to learn to say, ‘I deserve this, I’ve been there.’ And I’ve given them a lot of references from throughout my career where I’ve been in pressure situations, and I perform better once I let that go, when I understand, there’s more important things in this life than just winning or losing a softball game. And you can try too hard, you can put too much on yourself, and we never really perform well when we do that. So just getting them to remember why they play the game and have fun and look at it as an opportunity as opposed to, you know, a threat.”
