For the last five years, Elana Meyers has called the Mount Vernon Softball Field her second home. Although she didn’t help physically build it, she is the foundation of the program that uses it.
Beginning this afternoon and finishing Saturday, the George Washington shortstop, the program’s first signee when it became a varsity sport five years ago, will make her final three home appearances for the Colonials.
“I came here with the intention to help develop the program and really get it off the ground,” said Meyers. “Me and my teammates, whether it was the very first team and the first coach we had to now, wanted to try and get this program going. It’s been a trip, you know.”
Her legacy is already set — Meyers currently leads the team with a .405 batting average, 53 hits and 13 doubles. She leads the Atlantic 10 with a .518 average in conference games, and she’ll leave George Washington with nearly every one of the team’s offensive records.
First-year Colonials head coach Kim Staehle has had her own set of challenges just getting to know and understand her players this season, but it didn’t take her long to realize what Meyers has meant to George Washington softball.
“Just in regards to our recruiting contacts, internally we’ve done comparisons to the likes of an Elana and said, ‘Is she better than Elana?” said Staehle. “That’s how we rate some of our future incoming recruits, just in terms of her skills.”
The Colonials were a dismal 3-36 in their first season back in 2003, and from there, it got even worse. The team’s sophomore campaign was derailed when the season wascancelled seven games in after so many players were injured George Washington didn’t have enough to field a team. Meyers, who got back a year of eligibility, and her teammates weren’t even sure the program would continue.
But it did, and the Colonials were 10-34 in 2005 before improving to 24-28 last spring. Entering this weekend, George Washington is 21-24 overall and 8-10 in the A-10, currently in seventh place in the conference standings, one spot away from earning a first-ever berth in the A-10 tournament.
“It would be amazing,” said Meyers, now a graduate student. “It’s one of the things that I came in trying to accomplish, getting into the A-10 tournament working from nothing. It just shows how much this program has gone through.”
