Texas Tech’s softball team won their first game ever in the Women’s College World Series on Thursday, beating Ole Miss by a score of 1 to 0.
As has often been the case this season, the Red Raiders’ win was powered by pitcher NiJaree Canady, a transfer from Stanford who made headlines for being the first college softball player to earn $1 million in NIL deals.
Nathan Giese, sports reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, spoke to the Texas Standard about what makes Canady such a unique talent.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Can you first just explain what makes NiJaree Canady such a special player?
Nathan Giese: Well, this year it’s different because she’s a very different player from what she was at Stanford. Whereas at Stanford they didn’t want her to hit, they wanted her to focus on pitching, and when she went to the transfer portal, that was one of the things she wanted to do. She wanted to find a place where she could hit.
And Gerry Glasco is a renowned hitting coach, and he took over as head coach at Texas Tech. He put his name in the hat and said, “Hey, I’m not only going to let you hit, I’ve going to turn you into a pretty dang good hitter.” And that’s exactly what she’s been.
She’s been just as good pitching 30 and 5 with a 0.89, I believe, ERA going into the Women’s College World Series right now. She also leads the team with 11 home runs. She’s got about 34 RBI, batting 300 on the year.
So what she’s really done is she’s evolved her game into figuring out ways to still be a dominant pitcher, even when she’s not striking out everybody.
And that really shows the tenacity and consistency that she has that she can figure out ways to get the job done, even with she’s not quite to her usual standard. But even then she’s still the best pitcher in the country.
I mean, is she getting some comparisons to the all-star on the LA Dodgers, being able to pitch and hit?
Yes, that was one of the things before the season, I talked to her management team at Prestige Management Group about what kind of went into generating this move and this deal that she received. And they said they wanted her to be the Shohei Ohtani of women’s college softball. And that’s kind of what she is now.
The numbers, hitting-wise, they’re not quite where they would want to be, because of [an] injury. But when she is healthy and batting, she is just as good as any hitter out there.
She’s got a lot of power. She’s able to go to the opposite field, driving out home runs, and she’s able to do both things so well that teams have to respect both aspects of that.
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Well, you’ve mentioned that she wanted to hit and couldn’t do that at Stanford, but I gotta ask – I mean, Tech wasn’t exactly known as a softball powerhouse. Is it reasonable to think that Canady might not have moved there if it hadn’t been for its ability to reach deep into its pockets to pay her as well?
I think that’s putting it a little too, that’s kind of the easy scapegoat thing. So the way I’ve been told about it is yes, the money was a factor of it, but it wasn’t the only factor.
Some teams that wanted to come in and try to get her, they didn’t want her to hit either. So then she took them out of the running completely. Or she did kind of want to go back to Stanford, but it did come down to, am I going to be able to hit? And the money factor, it’s not nothing, but it wasn’t everything.
But the reason why Tech got into the running was because they were able to kind of put up some money and say, “Hey, we’re willing to pay you to do this for us.” And it didn’t ultimately come down to the money because – I’ve reported this throughout the year – she got that offer in late June and she didn’t make a decision until late July, because she was still looking at every option possible.
So that was not the defining factor. Did it play a role? Absolutely. Nobody’s naive enough to say that it didn’t. But it wasn’t the be-all end-all in this case.
What kind of attention has she brought to this Texas Tech program?
Quite a bit. So as soon as they signed her, it was very much a, oh, this team could really go do something.
But then when they went through their fall scrimmages – and they were playing community colleges, so it’s hard to get people out there in the fall when it’s cold and you’re playing teams that have no shot against a player like Canady – the fan buzz wasn’t quite there in the fall.
And it took a little bit after basketball season because Tech men’s basketball had a great year, too; there was a lot of attention on that. So it was like right after basketball ending was when people started really catching on to, Oh, this team is really, really good. And she’s really, really good.
And then they started breaking attendance records left and right. They set the new standard for attendance. They had to put more bleachers. They had the add seats into the outfield that they never had before just to accommodate the fans there. And it’s still growing to this point, but it’s definitely changed how people view the softball program.
