Joanna Lane joins CMU softball staff as an assistant coach
The Central Michigan softball team has hired former South Dakota State head coach Joanna Lane as an assistant coach.
As a head coach the past three seasons, Lane’s team set offensive records with the highest batting average, runs scored, doubles, triples and home runs. Lane came on CMU head coach Margo Jonker’s radar when she was an assistant at Northern Illinois.
“I’m very similar to coach Jonker, very firm, we have the same philosophy,” Lane said. “I think we’ll work great together.”
Lane will help as a hitting coach for the Chippewas with her South Dakota State teams having much success.
“I look for power and average,” Lane said. “We have to create opportunities on offense to generate runs. Stealing bases, getting hits and scoring runs — whatever it takes.”
She isn’t worried about moving from head coach to an assistant role and is excited to learn from Jonker and adding her knowledge to the program. “My goal is just to coach from a successful program,” Lane said.
Lane graduated from Georgetown in 2002, she joins the staff with another new addition of Jenna Alexander who’s a graduate assistant. Alexander played and was a student coach at Purdue.
“It’s a really exciting opportunity,” Lane said. “Two new people on the staff. It’s exciting.”
Jonker and Lane will have to focus on replacing vital seniors from last year’s team including Kari Seddon, Brittini Merchant and Amanda Patrick.
“It’s going to be a little bit of a rebuilding year,” Lane said. “Obviously the goal every year is to win though. There’s a lot of positions with no returning starters, so there will be competitions every day.”
CMU returns Kara Dornbos and Molly Coldren, leaders from last season. Coldren has nine more career home runs than any other player in program history.
If she gets 35 runs batted in next season, she’ll become the program leader in that as well. She had 39 last season.
“We do have things to build on,” Lane said. “Molly Coldren is coming off a great season and had a great tournament run.”
Dornbos is a piece the Chippewas can build off of in the circle last year.
Dornbos will be the ace after finishing with a team-best 2.25 earned run average and second team all-conference.
“I’m very excited to come to the program and compete for a championship,” Lane said.
