Version 7 proof that Oregon is capable of special things under Melyssa Lombardi

Although it may have ended at the hands of Oklahoma on Sunday night, the 2025 Oregon softball season was one hell of a ride. While making the leap to a new conference, everything came together for head coach Melyssa Lombardi to produce the best season that this program has seen in her seven years at the helm.

The 2025 campaign saw Lombardi accomplish a number of firsts. When she took over the program after Mike White's departure in 2018, Oregon had been one of the premier softball destinations on the West Coast, coming off a stretch in which they won four conference titles and reached the Women's College World Series four times in White's final five seasons. But as White left, so too did a majority of the roster, leaving Lombardi to essentially start from scratch.

It was a process that would take time, enduring the team's first losing campaign in a decade in 2019. But as she said after Sunday night's loss, "sometimes you have to go through a little bit of pain to get what you want."

As she found her footing as a coach, so too did the Ducks as one of the top teams in a competitive Pac-12. Oregon got off to a hot start in 2020 before spring sports were canceled around the country, but carried that momentum into 2021, winning 40 games for the first time under Lombardi as she reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time.

But there waiting for her was White and his Texas Longhorns, who would put an end to the Ducks' season at the Austin Regional. The 2022 season would end at regionals once again — this time in Fayetteville, Arkansas — before Lombardi took her next step forward when the Ducks were sent to Arkansas again in 2023, winning the Fayetteville Regional before ultimately falling to Oklahoma State.

Before coming to Eugene, Lombardi was a player, student assistant, assistant coach, and associate head coach for 24 seasons under Oklahoma's eight-time national championship-winning head coach, Patty Gasso. It was fitting, then, that before she could make the leap to the WCWS, her Ducks were sent to the Norman Regional in 2024, where they would fall in a pair of close games to Gasso's Sooners en route to their fourth-straight title. 

Lombardi's 2024 team saw the departures of program staples like Ariel Carlson, a Eugene-native from her very first recruiting class, who developed into an all-conference selection after posting the first 15-steal, 15-homer campaign in program history. "Version 6" of Lombardi's Ducks was a veteran-laden group, leaving plenty of questions for Version 7 with only two returners in the starting nine.

After Sunday's loss, she reflected on a time from last summer when she sat down with the team's senior leaders, outfielders Kai and Kedre Luschar, and shortstop Paige Sinicki, to have an "uncomfortable" conversation about what it would take to get them to Oklahoma City. She had found postseason success, but how could she truly elevate her program to the next level?

"I can remember sitting in my office, sitting there with Kai and Kedre and Paige and having conversations of what we have done well to this point, but what needs to change for us to elevate and go to another level," Lombardi said on Sunday. "It was the most uncomfortable and best meeting of my life because we sat down and we got real with each other. I got real with them, and they got real with me, and we needed that. From that moment on, we did not look back."

Lombardi decided to challenge her team in the fall, putting them in uncomfortable situations on the diamond so they could learn from their mistakes in practice. Her team responded, and she could tell that their energy was different. They began to understand that challenging things were not something to run away from, but rather an experience that would make them stronger, both individually as players on the field and together as a family off of it.

"Sometimes when things are hard, you want to shy away. This group didn't," Lombardi said of her Ducks. "They found joy in it, they stuck together, and they got what they wanted."

Despite its relative inexperience heading into the season that left expectations muted heading into the year, Oregon never looked fearful in 2025. The Ducks got out to a blazing start, one powered by their youth as Emma Cox, Stefini Ma'ake, and Rylee McCoy captured Big Ten Freshman of the Week honors after the first three weekends of the year.

When they were met with the challenge that is Tennessee's Karlyn Pickens and her record-setting fastball, they never wavered despite striking out 13 times with just one hit, fighting to come away with a 1-0 win in overtime. And when a top-10 Florida State team came to Jane Sanders Stadium in early March, they shut down the Seminoles twice to announce their arrival to a national audience.

The rest of the season would come with its ups and downs — a series win over UCLA to effectively clinch the regular-season conference title and a 5-0 loss to Michigan in the Big Ten Tournament — but through it all, the Ducks always stuck together. They knew it didn't matter how it looked, but as long as they played as a team, playing their brand of Oregon softball, they would find a way to get the job done.

Time and time again, that continued to prove true. After their late-season loss to Michigan State and early exit in the conference tournament nearly cost them as regional hosts to open the NCAA Tournament, the Ducks dropped their second game to Stanford, quickly sending them to a win-or-go-home duel with Weber State. They passed that test to get their next crack at the Cardinal the following day, blitzing them 15-5 in six innings to set up a winner-take-all game for the regional that Dezianna Patmon would end with one swing that will live in the minds of fans at The Jane for years to come. Another walk-off followed for Patmon the next weekend before a 13-1 thumping of Liberty sent Oregon to the WCWS.

The Ducks' season would end there, once again succumbing to the seemingly unstoppable Gasso and her Sooners, now on the march for their fifth-straight title. 

It was the end of Version 7, but for Lombardi, she knows it was just the start of what she's building in Eugene. Although it was important for her seniors, like the Luschars and Sinicki, to get to experience what softball is like in Oklahoma City, it was just as important for the rest of the team, setting the standard that the WCWS is where the Oregon Ducks belong.

"It was important for the senior group to get here and contend for a national championship, but also to bring this freshman group because this freshman group is pretty special, and the sophomore group and the junior group," she said on Sunday. "Just to get there your first year and from there, now that's the standard, it's pretty amazing."