Arizona’s Devyn Netz is Back and Better than Ever

It’s difficult to be one of a kind at Arizona. Olympian? Get in line. Women’s College World Series champion? NCAA record holder? We’re going to need you to be a bit more specific.

If something is possible on a softball field, someone in an Arizona uniform already did it.

And yet almost from the moment she arrived in Tucson, Devyn Netz has been a Wildcat unlike any who came before.

She was part of Mike Candrea’s final World Series team—and helped engineer Caitlin Lowe’s first as his successor.

She experienced the pain of being part of the first Arizona team in nearly 40 years to miss the NCAA Tournament.

After 10 innings, 163 pitches and a two-run double to help her own cause, she was the winning pitcher in the first game between Arizona and UCLA as non-conference opponents.

Most recently, she threw Arizona’s first pitch and hit its first home run in Big 12 competition.

If she’s living in interesting times, as the old proverb goes, Netz is well cast to lead Arizona through them. How does one of the most tradition-rich programs in college sports write its next chapter? Leaning on a “unicorn,” as assistant coach Christian Conrad describes someone with 11 wins and a 2.61 ERA and nine home runs and a 1.243 OPS, is a good start.

But Arizona had unicorns before. Netz is made for this moment because she embodies the best of Arizona’s past—and also because she faced down an uncertain future and found the courage to grow.

Doubt flourishes amid uncertainty. Netz has been there. First, after a junior season that began with boundless confidence and ended without a postseason. And again the following fall, when a back injury forced her to sit out her senior season.

Opportunity also flourishes amid uncertainty. Sidelined for a season, Netz learned to trust a new pitching coach’s lessons. Forced to sweat out grueling physical therapy sessions, she learned to trust her body again. And most importantly, during her season without softball, she learned to value every minute of whatever is to come.

“I truly appreciate every moment at practice, because a year ago today, I wasn’t able to do that,” Netz said. “I would look at my teammates who were healthy, and I wished I was in those shoes. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who were put in my path to help me come back.

“My perspective is to just enjoy every game, but play every game and be at every practice as if it’s my last. Every pitch I throw, throw as if it’s my last. Every swing I take, swing as if it’s my last. It is cherishing this long journey and where softball has taken me.”

Riding the Roller Coaster

Netz was a highly-touted recruit coming out of high school, but again, that doesn’t make you special at Arizona. She played sparingly as a freshman, watching the likes of Dejah Mulipola, Jessie Harper, Alyssa Palomino-Cardoza and Alyssa Denham lead the Wildcats to the World Series for the 28th and ultimately final time under Candrea.

Her time came the following season, at least as a pitcher. With Lowe taking over as head coach, Netz registered just four at-bats but started 25 games in the circle and led the staff with 15 wins. Her last two wins came in spectacular fashion, a two-hit shutout in a 1-0 win at Missouri that clinched the regional and a complete game at Mississippi State that clinched the super regional.

Arizona was an Oklahoma City surprise in 2022 but Netz appeared to be on an All-American trajectory familiar in Tucson. It wouldn’t be quite so straightforward.

After winning their first five games in 2023, the Wildcats compiled a losing record the rest of the way. A 6-18 record in the Pac-12 doomed their postseason chances. Plenty of players would have loved Netz’s line for the year. Pitching and hitting on a full-time basis, she hit 13 home runs with a .959 OPS and won 16 games with a 3.88 ERA. But after she struggled in the circle in league play, it wasn’t enough to save the season. And it wasn’t enough to satisfy her standards.

“I understood it takes much more of a mental tolerance to be able to play on both sides of the ball,” Netz said of the season’s lessons. “That was something that took a lot of emotion out of me, and it took a lot for me to learn and balance it.”

Still, Netz didn’t grow up in a world that offered much time to dwell on things. Get lost in your own thoughts and you risked missing a ball one of your brothers whipped at you as hard as he could in backyard games of catch (a year ahead of her, current Arizona baseball pitching analyst Dawson Netz ranks among that program’s all-time appearance leaders). When she felt the aggrieved party in some dispute, her parents were usually less interested in litigating the details than asking her what she was going to do about it. That’s just how it went. So, junior season behind her, she charged ahead the only way she knew how—at full speed.

“I was like a bull in a china shop,” Netz said. “I was going to wreck everyone in my way. Going into my true senior year, I was ready and no one was going to take that away from me.”

Before anyone had the chance to try, her own body took that away from her. She hurt her back just as fall ball was getting underway in 2023. It kicked off a frustrating cycle. The pain would subside, she would try to throw again for a couple of days or maybe a week, only for some movement to cause the pain to flare up again. She saw some progress after spending the long December break working with multiple physical therapists, but the clock was ticking.

‘When I came back in January and started practicing, I felt like I had to play in bubble wrap,” Netz said. “I couldn’t play freely. I wasn’t able to mentally just let myself go and let myself play.”

As the 2024 season began, concerned that she might do lasting damage if she continued trying to plow ahead, she yielded to what her back was telling her and shut down.

In a little more than 18 months, she had gone from living out a dream as Arizona’s starting pitcher in the Women’s College World Series to the nightmare of an uncertain future on the field.

Rebuilding the Pitcher

In addition to the training and strength staff at Arizona, Netz is quick to extend credit for her physical recovery to Nick Conte, a former rehab coordinator with the Los Angeles Dodgers who now owns Conte Sports Performance, and Aaron McGuinness, owner of Aspire Physical Therapy. Choosing to skip the team’s trip to Italy this past summer to maximize her time in recovery, grueling therapy and rehab sessions involved everything from soft tissue treatments to retooling her swing movements to essentially relearning how to lift weights from scratch.

But even before her body began to mend, she found an ally ready to help her emerge from her redshirt season a better pitcher. Hired after the 2023 season, Conrad was familiar with Netz as an opponent from his time as an assistant at Loyola Marymount and generally through his Pac-12 ties as a former Oregon assistant. But the two had only worked together for a handful of bullpen sessions by the time Netz began experiencing pain.

A first-year pitching coach had plenty on his hands trying to replace her innings. But all the more once Netz wasn’t on the field, Conrad sat down with her to watch tape of every pitch she had thrown the previous season. The virtual bullpens, as the sessions effectively became, helped keep her involved—never easy with an injured player. More than that, they helped build a rapport that would have been difficult to establish in just one season together.

“We wanted to learn what her pitch calling style is and how she likes to attack batters—and we were also clarifying what types of swing paths certain types of hitter have and what in her arsenal will typically beat them,” Conrad said. “But then it was also just her understanding how good her tools actually were. I’ve been preaching to her, ‘You can throw any type of pitch in any quadrant of the zone. You could be an All-American pitcher.’

“Her being able to hear that—and seeing the numbers to back it up with our Yakkertech information—I think that’s been a really cool way for her to gain some confidence on the mound and just trust her abilities.”

At the forefront of the analytics revolution in softball pitching, hence the reference to the technology for tracking movement and spin, Conrad nonetheless also has the people skills to turn data into something that resonates.

“He made me feel like I was the best pitcher in the world,” Netz said. “When he works with the pitchers, he makes you feel like your stuff is the best stuff to ever compete in this game. That’s something that really changed my perspective because coming off of my junior year, I felt like every team knew my stuff, and I almost had to pitch the game of my life every single game.”

Conrad also helped tweak her mechanics, which she and her physical therapists felt were the source of the pain. They focused on her hip positioning, getting her to land with her foot at around a 45-degree angle instead of toward third base at nearly 90 degrees.

The results speak for themselves. Notably, her 62:11 strikeout-to-walk ratio and 1.03 WHIP are well ahead of her previous seasons, evidence of a more refined approach.

“She has multiple velos on different pitches, so that’s always tricky,” Conrad said. “When you can throw three different speeds in the strike zone consistently, you’re going to be hard to hit. She’s comfortable throwing in and outside to both righties and lefties. They can’t just sit one side of the plate with her. And she can move the ball up north and south. That’s a big thing that we’ve been working on with her this year.”

A Growth Mindset

Arizona and UCLA’s meeting in this year’s Judi Garmin Classic was everything we will miss about the rivalry—competitive, intense, and just a little madcap.

After Netz allowed a single and a walk against the top of the lineup with the game tied in the top of the seventh inning, Megan Grant punished the imperfections by hitting a three-run home run on an 0-2 pitch. Alone in the pitching circle, Netz couldn’t push away the thought of ‘Why does this always happen to me?’

Why, in other words, must she always live in interesting times?

Soon after, centerfielder Regan Shockey pulled her aside and told her she was so much stronger than the moment. Shockey assured her that the rest of the team had her back.

Sure enough, Shockey was part of a three-run rally that tied the game in the bottom of the seventh. Netz drove in the tying run, then retired the Bruins in the eighth and ninth innings.

And what about when UCLA’s Kaniya Bragg hit a two-run home run in the top of the 10th, Netz now well past 150 pitches? Arizona’s Emily Schepp led off the bottom of the inning with a tying two-run homer (tiebreaker rules were in place). Kaiah Altmeyer eventually drove in the walk-off run.

Netz’s line told a story of resilience rather than dominance—10 IP, 8 H, 4 BB, 6 ER. It wasn’t the best game she ever pitched. But it was one of the more unforgettable wins. Come what may be against an unforgiving opponent, Netz did all she could and trusted her teammates to do the same. It was night and day from her junior season, when she so often appeared to bear the weight of the world—and the expectations of Arizona’s history—on her shoulders.

“We talked a lot about getting on the other side of that uncomfortable feeling of failure,” Lowe said of the past two years. “The UCLA game was just this breakthrough of ‘I’m uncomfortable, getting hit a little bit, I don’t care.’ She was still the best option in that moment. She’s not always going to be for 10 innings, but she was the best option in that moment. And she grinded right through uncomfortable and got to the other side of it. … Her teammates were fighting for her and she got to experience what not feeling like your best self was and figuring out a way to win.

“It was so freeing for her, to feel that moment because it always felt like she was knocking on the door junior year of that and just never quite got there.”

That door opened in her year away from the field.

Go back to the conversation with Shockey, initiated by the sophomore, during the UCLA game. Netz admits that her on-field and near-field demeanor has led opponents—and more than a few teammates—to call her “scary,” among other things. She’s no more apologetic for that intensity than someone like Danielle Lawrie ever was. It’s who she needs to be between the lines.

But for the better part of her first three years at Arizona, softball consumed her, making it harder for others to see the thoughtful, introspective young person figuring it out as she went along. Always the bull in the china shop on the field, she led by dragging people along with her, daring them to out-compete her and trusting they and the team would be better for trying.

She couldn’t do that when she wasn’t in uniform last season, not that it stopped her trying on at least one occasion when an early-season game wasn’t going well. It was only when she accepted the limitations and, in her words, “actually listened and, you know, stopped talking,” that she discovered how many of her teammates cared about what she had to say and offer—how often they sought her out.

Netz doesn’t need to drag people with her anymore. As Shockey reminded her, they will follow her into the fire of their own free will—and pick her up when she stumbles.

“I can be a competitor, I can be intimidating, and that’s just how I compete and play my game,” Netz said. “But off the field, what kind of person are you? Are you still that same person who’s not approachable? Or are you going be a leader who’s also approachable and can actually lead people in a way that they can lean on you, they can relate to you, they can talk to you. They know you’ll listen to them. It really changed my perspective of the kind of leader I wanted to be.”

A leader for a unique moment in time.

From a legendary coach to his protege. From back-to-back World Series to uncharted waters. From the Pac-12 to the Big 12. From the pitching circle to physical therapy.

For all she’s accomplished living—and growing—in interesting times, there can never be another Devyn Netz at Arizona.

In a program where it isn’t easy to be unique, that’s a legacy worth celebrating.

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