This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
During the University of Utah's five years of Pac-12 membership, women's softball coach Amy Hogue has done some of the athletic department's best work, lifting her program into the top half of the highly competitive conference.
Hogue is one of four Utah alumni whose coaching performances have converged to make softball potentially the most successful college sport in the state in the 2015-16 school year — with the final outcome hinging on postseason performances. Utah, BYU and Weber State will play this week in the NCAA Tournament at various sites and Salt Lake Community College will compete in the NJCAA event in St. George.
The 2015 football season in Utah is comparable to softball's showing, with all three FBS teams playing in bowl games, Southern Utah making the FCS playoffs and Snow College finishing No. 2 in the NJCAA rankings.
With the asterisk that BYU's Gordon Eakin played baseball for Utah, the Utes have produced the head coaches of all four of the state's softball teams that are competing in the postseason. Any of the four could be considered the state's coach of the year.
Eakin's Cougars won the West Coast Conference championship, Hogue's Utes finished fourth in the Pac-12 and received a second consecutive NCAA bid, Mary Kay Amicone's Weber State club won the Big Sky Conference tournament title for the second year in a row and Cyndee Bennett's SLCC Bruins claimed the Region 18 tournament championship.
The stories of Hogue and Amicone were even more amazing as of last May, considering how far their programs had come in a short time. They deserve credit for following through on those breakthrough seasons. Utah went 2-22 in Pac-12 play in 2012, and the Utes have climbed to fourth place in the nine-team league for a second straight year, finishing 13-10. Amicone took over a Weber State team that had had gone 10-38 in the fourth year of the relaunched program. In her third season, the Wildcats are 37-13.
At SLCC, Bennett has maintained the level of performance that Amicone established, with the Bruins posting a 44-7 record this season. Amicone took the Bruins to three straight NJCAA title games before moving to Weber State. Over the past two seasons, Bennett's record is 92-16.
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