The NERS PhD student helped lead the U-M Club Softball Team to its first-ever NCSA Division I National Championship. In this Q&A, she reflects on the team’s championship journey, how softball has shaped her approach to research and leadership, and why staying connected to the sport has made her a stronger, more balanced graduate student.
Last month, the University of Michigan Club Softball Team made history by winning its first-ever NCSA Division I National Championship. Among the athletes leading the charge was NERS PhD student Colleen Campbell, who pitched throughout the tournament and helped guide the Wolverines to a dramatic 8–7 victory in the final game.
Colleen is no stranger to balancing high-level academics and athletics. As a researcher in radiation detection and the president of the U-M Chapter of Women in Nuclear, she exemplifies leadership on and off the field. In the Q&A below, Colleen reflects on her 13-year softball journey, what it means to be part of a national championship team, and how the lessons she’s learned on the field shape her research, leadership, and time management as a graduate student.
I first played softball when I was 11, and continued throughout middle school and high school before getting recruited to play in college. All told, this was my 13th year playing. I have pitched throughout all of it because my first coach made everyone try pitching and I ended up really enjoying it. I was fortunate to have coaches later on who taught me how deliberate and strategic pitching can be, making it just as much an intellectual pursuit as a physical one.
I lost my last two seasons of college ball to COVID. I spent my first two years here missing my team and the sport that was such a big part of my life for so long. I’ve known for a long time that softball will always be part of my life, but I had assumed after undergrad that the most I could do was coach. I actually looked into adult leagues in the area first, but unless I wanted to play in a men’s league or drive to the UP, I was out of luck. I’m so grateful for the friends I’ve made in grad school, but there’s a connection you can only build with people you share a sport with. And especially this sport. Softball was not something that came easily to me, but it’s something I spent years getting good at, so in some ways playing softball is a nice reminder that progress might feel incremental, but eventually it pays off. Mostly, though, I just missed the happiness softball and being on a team gave me.
I’m going to cheat and give you two. One thing I’ve learned to love about club sports is the balance you get between your identities as an athlete and as a student or researcher. In the winter semester, my team has a tradition where each week one person has five minutes to talk about something they are really passionate about that isn’t at all related to softball. At least half of these talks this year were people sharing about the research they’ve gotten into and why they are studying the fields they are in and how they are hoping their research will make a difference in the world. Several others talked about community work they engage in. Overall, these are opportunities to appreciate multiple facets of the people you spend a lot of time with, where you normally only see one side of who they are.
The other was in the semifinals game against Air Force. Both teams were scoreless through seven innings, so we went into extra innings, which you start with a runner on second base. For the first time, we let a run score. I reminded my team that we just needed the one run to stay in the game. If they could give us that, I and our defense could hold Air Force the next inning to give us another chance to score. And they did it, my team scored the one run we needed to stay in the game. As promised, the next inning we didn’t let Air Force score. My teammate, Melina, who started on second base that inning is our one freshman and one of the players I drive to practice and games throughout the year. She scored the run that won us the game…on a hit by Shannon, a junior who is the other member of our carpool. I was so proud of them both for everything they’ve done this season and how they worked together that inning to get us that final run needed to advance to the national championship game.
Preparing specifically for nationals is nearly impossible because the season is set up so that we find out if we’re making it to nationals the weekend of finals week. So a decent portion of the team is scattered at internships or returning home to family in the weeks immediately preceding nationals. Especially with this arrangement, it’s the work we put in way earlier in the season that prepares us the most. The practices at 11pm in February that we all dutifully show up to and do our best at, the trust we have built in our teammates throughout practice, and the joy we get out of playing together are what most prepare us for nationals.
This is a hardworking and skilled team, and we have great depth. Most teams are not successful without having both strong hitting and pitching. This team hit well throughout this year, against a variety of different pitchers. While they hit a decent number of home runs, this team’s hitting strength was their ability to hit the ball hard, on the ground, or as line drives. Putting the ball in play like that creates a chance something can happen, whether that be hitting it past someone, or causing them to make an error, or giving our runners the chance to run fast enough to reach the base before they could be thrown out.
We also had multiple pitchers ranked in the top ten (or better) for wins, strikeouts, and fewest hits per game. But these skill levels are just the basis for what I think really made us successful. This team believed in itself, and every member believed in her teammates. We all made mistakes throughout the year, we all apologized to someone for something we did wrong. But we also all believed it when our teammates said it was okay, the team collectively would recover, and that they knew we would do better next time. You fail more than you succeed in the individual things in softball. But when we let our teammates pick us up and we can move on and focus on the next thing, the overall outcome can still be positive, as my team showed all year!
This team is amazing. We’ve built a really great group of women whom I respect and enjoy being around, so not only is it fun because it’s competitive, it’s also just a supportive environment to be a part of. At its root, softball is a game of failure, more so than almost anything else most of us will do in our lives, so one of the most important qualities for a team is the support everyone has for each other. This team has it. We really do always pick each other up, both in terms of the offense scoring runs if a pitcher gives up one, but also by reminding each other that we’re all still good athletes and that we all still trust each other to do what we need to the very next inning.
We made it to the DIII World Series my freshman year of college and tied for 7th. I decided on the trip back to Boston afterward that it wasn’t good enough. I wanted to win the whole thing. Two years later, I knew that if we were going to win it any year, that was our year to do it…and then COVID happened without us getting to play a single game that season, and I never got to play another game of varsity softball. So I thought I was going to have to live with that. Last year, club softball tied for 7th at nationals. And then this year, I got that feeling again. My team has some incredible hitters on it, and we have some of the best pitching in the country. So if we were going to win, it was going to be this year. And we did it! So, it took seven years, but I finally met my goal.
I’ve been balancing softball with academic and work commitments since I was in high school working in the morning before school to earn money to pay for the gas I needed to drive to softball practice. It was definitely the most difficult during undergrad because the time commitment for all 3 (school, work, and softball) was the highest of any point.
But speaking specifically to the balance during my PhD, the biggest thing it comes down to is that to be successful and happier in our work as researchers, you need some way to relieve stress, and exercise is a great way to do that. Other people run or swim, which maybe gives them a little more flexibility because they can determine their own schedule, but during weeks without games, the time commitment for club softball is only about 4 hours. In the fall, when practices are in the evening so we can be outside, balancing the two sometimes means coming back into the lab to check on or start new measurements after practice. But in the winter, our earliest practice starts at 9pm, so the tradeoff is more between having time to read or relax at home and being at practice. But overall, it comes down to the fact that I know my life is happier when softball is part of it, so I end up being more productive in the lab for it. And Professor Wehe, my advisor, has really helped with that by encouraging me to continue pursuing softball throughout my time here.
I think softball is one of the keystones for how I approach any of those. As I talked about earlier, softball and baseball are a game where even the best hitters fail more times than they succeed. There’s a reason they give pitchers 4 balls but only 3 strikes. You have to be okay with trying and failing if you are going to enjoy softball. I can’t help it, I’m going to quote Babe Ruth: “Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” That is how it has to be for most researchers too, otherwise how do you keep going when experiments fail or it takes months to get experiments even set up properly because of issues along the way.
I’ve learned the most valuable lessons about leadership from playing softball, especially from my travel ball coach in high school. She placed a lot of emphasis on the idea that everyone on our team could be a leader in their own way and in different areas. She helped all of us who were willing learn what our strengths as leaders are and how to leverage them. As part of that, the teams that played for her didn’t have team captains. The people who learned how to lead over the course of the year playing together became our leaders. Going through this process of figuring out what skills we each had that we could use to lead others was crucial to understanding ourselves as leaders, but going through it at the same time as our teammates taught us how to identify those skills in others too. When you’ve grown accustomed to the idea that everyone can lead in some way, regardless of their position in a program, you start to recognize which skills the people around you are leveraging to lead (whether they know it or not), and begin encouraging them to lean into those. Sometimes, like in this club softball program, there are a number of named positions, so this encouragement can be by suggesting specific teammates run for positions they are suited for. Other times it means asking for suggestions from teammates who think about the game critically to get their insight shaping the program. All of that is transferable to any lab group or work team.
Just having a commitment outside of work that is at times 30+ hours a week forces you to develop time management skills if you want to be able to do anything else ever. If I assume I slept 6 hours/night in college, I had about 12 hours of time each week that weren’t softball, academics, my job, or necessary things like eating meals. So to be able to do as well as I tried to do in my classes and softball, I had to learn how to get the most out of even the short breaks between classes or the twenty minutes between dinner and softball practice. But one of the things I learned about time that has stuck with me most is the idea of knowing it’s limited and appreciating that. If you’ve never heard the “A Thousand Marbles” story, I encourage you to look it up. We read it when I was in high school. The main point is that you only have so much time in your life to spend with the people you love or doing the things you enjoy. In the story, you throw out a marble every Saturday to remind you to make the most of the Saturdays you have, and that any Saturdays after the jar is empty are a gift. After reading the story, my coach went around and gave each of us a jar with one marble for each season of the years we had left before the end of high school. Those marbles were the only seasons of softball we could reasonably expect to keep playing, and anything after that was something to be truly thankful for. This was my sixth year on a softball team since I emptied out that jar, and I can’t express how grateful I am to have gotten the opportunity to continue playing. So now I try to manage my time so that I can do the best research I feel I can, while still making sure that there is time for the other things that make my life fuller.
I research both scintillator and semiconductor detectors. My research on semiconductors is on characterizing polycrystalline semiconductor materials for use as radiation detectors. We have looked at both known detector materials like cesium lead bromide (CsPbBr3) and new materials like sodium tantalate (NaTaO3). My work with scintillators focuses on introducing a mechanism for internal multiplication of the scintillation light output using optical re-excitation.
I took a nuclear engineering class during my sophomore year of undergrad with the most enthusiastic professor I’ve ever had. He was so excited about the physics going on behind everything that you got swept up in that excitement. Looking back after, that wasn’t even my first experience with nuclear physics. I did a project in high school modeling the radioactive decay of various isotopes, and I’ve always been drawn to the math behind everything in nuclear engineering (I was a math major in college). I got into radiation detection through an internship at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) with Dr. Mitchell Myjak shortly after my first detector lab class and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I decided that was what I wanted to study in grad school.
I am the president of our Women in Nuclear chapter here and have served in other roles previously. I went to an all-girls high school that had a strong STEM focus, and then I went to MIT for my undergrad and played softball there. I was always surrounded by women interested in STEM who believed that was the field for them and had strong support for this. Not having an environment in which there are other women studying similar fields can be isolating, and I know how beneficial those earlier environments were for me, so it was important for me to create this space for others. I think that as more women join nuclear and find these spaces that encourage them and support them, more women will stay in the field, which will hopefully in turn encourage more women to join the field. Maybe someday women will be sufficiently represented in the field that such spaces aren’t necessary, but until then, spaces such as WIN are essential to forming connections and encouraging women that they do belong in their fields of interest. It has also been a great opportunity to connect with other women mentors in nuclear engineering through local WiN events and through attending U.S. WIN National conferences, expanding this support system.