I Will Reach The Summit: St. Thomas' C.J. Jacobson

By C.J. Jacobson, St. Thomas

Every Summit League student-athlete has a story and “Reaching The Summit” means something different to each one of them. In these features, we let our student-athletes share those stories in their own words. Thanks for taking a look.

NOTE: C.J. Jacobson starts her junior season with St. Thomas Softball in 2021-22. The Tommies’ leadoff hitter and center fielder, an NCAA All-Region and All-MIAC honoree, Jacobson helped her team recover from a slow start during the 2021 season to post a 9-2 postseason record and place fifth nationally in the team’s final season in Division III softball. She explains how she and her teammates had to overcome the challenges of COVID, while having an inexperienced roster and while navigating uncertainty with St. Thomas’ transition to Division I and the impending changing of the guard with the team’s coaching staff.

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Describing Tommie Softball is like trying to describe a color that doesn’t exist … you can’t. 

What fans see is a winning team with excellent culture and competitiveness. What they don’t see behind the curtain is the grind and the number of hours put into training. 

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As we enter our 2021-22 season – our first at the Division I level -- the grind will be both more fun and more challenging. I’m super excited to see how we can progress as a team. We understand there’s a learning curve and many challenges to overcome as we take on so many experienced teams with such talented rosters. However, we love a challenge and we see this as an opportunity to test ourselves and to grow. 

Athletes like myself who started their first collegiate season in the fall of 2019 experienced many challenges such as COVID shutting down our first college season in March of 2020. The pandemic continued to affect our fall and winter preparation and training into the 2020-21 school year, but we kept working. 

For me, I looked at quarantine as an opportunity to get better and grow as an individual with the extra time we were given. Although we weren’t able to work together in person as a team, we sure made it memorable with two-hour and sometimes even three-hour daily zoom calls with our former head coach, John Tschida. (Yes, three hours -- I have pages of notes in my book to prove it, ha).

We understand there’s a learning curve and many challenges to overcome as we take on so many experienced teams with such talented rosters. However, we love a challenge and we see this as an opportunity to test ourselves and to grow.
-C.J. Jacobson

However, that passion for the sport and that engagement is part of what set us apart as a program. For those of you who have played baseball and softball, you know this sport is more of a mental test than it is a physical test. As we approached our 2021 spring season, the challenges continued to pile up. 

Our skills and mental game were not up to par with the usual high standard of St. Thomas Softball. Our number of underclassmen players (25) outnumbered our upperclassmen group (13), forcing many of the younger players to take on leadership roles. Two-thirds of our team had never played in a conference doubleheader as collegians coming in to last spring.

As we made progress and endured some setbacks last season, another potential obstacle emerged just before the postseason was set to start. Coach Tschida announced plans to take a job at his alma mater, St. Mary’s (Minn.), and stay as a Division III head coach, to help continue to develop players into something they never thought was achievable. He has made me rethink my outlook on softball and life during practices, and Tommie Softball will forever appreciate him. 

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This news might have shaken some teams, but Tommie Softball continued to grind and kept its focus. Despite not winning the conference race, we rallied to win eight consecutive postseason games to sweep the conference and regional playoff championships. We went on to take fifth in the national tournament. The grind it took to get where we ended was impeccable. 

We flipped a switch and learned how to become “ornerier” per Coach Tschida. We knew that every rep must be done with intent, but it took that switch being flipped to finally understand what it feels like and how to hold each other accountable. We learned to compete and fully go for it.

I believe embracing this mentality again will help us fight our next challenges at the Division I level. Going into the Summit League, we are excited to learn and compete at the next level. Not to mention, we also get to meet and work with a new head coach and several new recruits in starting the next chapter in program history, which will be led by Head Coach Jen Bagley Trotter and some other new coaches. 

A great life lesson from Tommie Softball for me and my teammates is to keep grinding away at the little things to achieve a high-end goal. It’s up to the team and individuals to determine what those goals will be. And, one thing all Tommie athletes have in common as we start our Division I chapter -- we all must continue to fight and grind every day to be able to reach our goals and our potential.

-C.J. Jacobson, St. Thomas junior softball player

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