How Ashley Chastain Woodard sells her softball program to players while trying to build a winner at South Carolina

Ashley Chastain Woodard knows what this place can become. Her experiences as a player and graduate assistant led her back to South Carolina, now as head coach.

But it’s much easier said than done to sell a program that hasn’t won much in years. While the Gamecocks have been to the NCAA Tournament eight times since 2014, they’ve finished bottom-three in the SEC standings in five different seasons. Their last trip to the Women’s College World Series was in 1997.

In the SEC coaches’ preseason poll, South Carolina was picked to finish last in the league. Many on the outside don’t seem to have faith in the team for the 2025 season.

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So how does Chastain Woodard get players to buy into her vision? It starts by getting them on campus to develop “the feelings that they get with the people that they spend time with.”

“For us, it’s just really important that we showcase, obviously our wonderful facilities,” Chastain Woodard said, “but more importantly just the people that are in the program that surround the program, that really believe that this softball program, this athletic department is premier and it’s championship and it can do really great things.”

When Chastain Woodard was hired last summer, one of her initial goals was to bring the best players from around the country to South Carolina. She managed to do that by adding six freshmen in a 2024 recruiting class that ranked No. 11 nationally, according to Extra Innings Softball.

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Her staff also utilized the transfer portal to bring in a trio of players from other schools. But they also had the benefit of plucking six players from her previous stop at Charlotte, where the 49ers were successful in winning the AAC Tournament Championship in 2024 to go along with back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances.

“You want to instill that (winning) feeling in everyone that walks through your door so that they leave Columbia feeling like, ‘Man, I want to be a part of that,'” Chastain Woodard said. “It’s like an emotion, it’s a feeling attached to the people that they spend time with. And then one day we look up and it’s like we’ve won championships and we have trophies.”

As for how the talent will translate over to the season remains to be seen with Opening Day just days away. But moving forward, this will be the reality for Chastain Woodard of having to reload every season. To be able to do that and find the right players, she looks for those who share the same passion and vision for the program that she has.

“They want to go somewhere that there is a lot of excitement and expectation and vision,” she said. “So that’s what we’ve done, and we’ll continue to try to do that as we work through the recruiting cycle, our current team. Just everybody that we’re bringing into the program here in this first chapter.”

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