Stephanie Paris enters her second season as head coach of the softball program in 2013-14 after taking over the reins in July 2012, becoming the seventh head coach in the program’s history.
The Lady Govs finished with an 18-26 record overall and 9-16 in Ohio Valley Conference play in Paris’ first season, just falling short of making the conference tournament for the first time in six years on the last day of the regular season.
Three players earned individual OVC recognition in 2013, as two juniors earned All-OVC honors, with Lauren de Castro being named to the OVC First-Team and Kayla Davidson getting OVC Second-Team honors, while sophomore Laurel Burroughs took home OVC Player of the Week honors on Feb. 18.
There were also several individual and team records broken in Paris’ initial season at the helm, with freshman Courtney Brower setting a new hit-by-pitch mark (12) and de Castro posting a .995 fielding percentage.
As a team, the Lady Govs set new marks for doubles (65) and home runs (34) in a single season, while also seeing its team overall batting average rise to its highest mark since the 1997 campaign and its slugging percentage the second highest total in the program’s history.
Paris also became only the second coach in the program’s history to win her season-opening game to start her career.
A former Ohio Valley Conference standout as a player at Tennessee Martin, Paris spent the prior five seasons as an assistant coach for Colorado State University-Pueblo.
While at CSU-P, she has helped the ThunderWolves to five 20-plus winning seasons that saw them participate in the post-season conference tourney each season. It also included a No. 4 regional ranking this past season. CSU-P was the 2009 NCAA National Tourney regional runner up in 2009.
Before her stint at CSU-P, the Brentwood native took over a Ravenwood High School program at its inception in 2005 and led them to a 7-20 record. Ravenwood improved to 19-18 the following season and 33-17 in 2007.
In her short time there, Paris developed 10 all-district selections and one all-region product.
As a player, Paris played two seasons at Jackson State Community College where she was named the 2001 Tennessee Junior College Player of the Year and was later inducted into the Jackson State Athletics Hall of Fame. Paris owned a career .354 batting mark at the school.
From there she went to UT Martin where she set records for stolen bases and stolen-base attempted. She earned honorable mention All-OVC in 2003.
