Van Nostrand may be an administrator, but her heart is still on the softball field

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Erin Van Nostrand was decked out in a T-shirt, athletic shorts and sneakers as she helped line the South Field at Lehman College for the Lightning’s upcoming soccer season. It was 11 o’clock in the morning and this was not the location one would expect to find Lehman’s new associate director of athletics. Nor was her wardrobe the kind one would expect her to be wearing.

But Van Nostrand is a doer, and everywhere she has been, doing her thing, has resulted in stunning successes.

It all started for the Long Beach, Long Island native during her days at tiny Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and continued at little-known Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. All of this eventually led her to her new gig at Lehman.

At Pine Manor, a small women’s college, Van Nostrand took over a struggling softball program and turned it into a regional powerhouse. She posted 20-plus win seasons in each of her four years there, including a school-record 31-win campaign in 2008. And she turned the program around under some very trying circumstances.

“At Pine Manor, in our first meeting, we had eight kids,” said Van Nostrand, who joined Lehman in April. “We literally had to pull a kid from the tennis team who had never played softball before. We had to pull a kid from Scotland off the basketball team, who literally didn’t know how to play softball at all. Then we were going to Florida for a trip and one of my seniors had to do her student-teaching, so we went down there with only seven kids who knew how to play softball. We had only 11 with us in total. We lost all 10 games in Florida and I was like, ‘What in the world are we going to do now?’”

Recruiting like crazy

But Van Nostrand is a doer, so what she did was restock the Pine Manor softball team with talent, and proceed to make history at the school.

“We came back from Florida and we practiced a lot and wound up finishing third in the conference that year,” Van Nostrand said. “Then I went out and recruited like crazy. My whole thing when recruiting was to bring in good athletes and teach them. You just make them the best players that they can be. Our kids were really gritty and hungry and competed until the very end, and that’s a big part of why we were so good.”

Having achieved all she could at Pine Manor, Van Nostrand began looking for bigger challenges. She found one at Pacific Lutheran University.

“I had a couple of other offers along the way,” Van Nostrand said. “I had a couple of Division I offers, but it just wasn’t the right fit at the fight time. Then my college coach [rom Keene State in New Hampshire] told me about PLU. So, I applied and I really liked the AD and I thought, ‘OK this is a place where you can be successful.’ At the time the program was down, they had won only 17 or 18 games.”

Those win totals would eventually begin to rise following Van Nostrand’s arrival in 2008, as would the reputation of the softball program at PLU.

After posting over 30 wins in the 2011 season and being shut out of the NCAA Tournament, Van Nostrand took PLU to heights it had never seen before or since, as the Lutes not only earned a spot in the 2012 NCAA Tournament but won the national championship, earning Van Nostrand National Coach of the Year honors. Four years later, it still seems like a dream.

“It’s crazy, it’s still so surreal,” Van Nostrand said. “We didn’t even get into the tournament the year before. We went 33-11 the year before and had beaten Linfield College twice, and they went on to beat everybody in the national tournament in 2011. So, we knew we were good and we didn’t really graduate anybody and I went out and got a couple of other pieces, so I knew we could compete on that level because we had beaten Linfield, who at the time was the standard for Division III softball. But then we were told we needed to play a stronger schedule, so I went into my dean and said, ‘OK, I’m going to Hawaii and I’m going to Texas’ and she was like: ‘Where are you going to get that money from?’ I said I’d fundraise.”

Again, Van Nostrand the doer did her thing and helped raise almost $90,000. The trip to Hawaii and Texas was on.

“We did a silent auction crab-feed dinner,” Van Nostrand said. “That was a lot of work and it was the week before we started practice. We also did a lot of camps and clinics and things like that.”

Conference champs

The trips to Hawaii and Texas proved fruitful for the Lutes, who won eight of the 10 games on the two trips. PLU then went on to win the Northwest Conference, and then went on to the NCAA Regionals in Tyler, Texas. It was a stacked field that included PLU, as well as traditional Division III softball powers Tyler College (Texas), Claremont College (California) and Redlands College (California).

“That regional you had probably four of the best teams in the country,” Van Nostrand said. It was when Van Nostrand’s Lutes won the regional that she dared to dream big.

“Once we got out of the regionals I thought, ‘Holy cow. We might be able to do this,’” Van Nostrand said. “My players never had a single doubt in their mind that they were going to win it. Four years later it’s still surreal, still crazy.”

But one year later, when the graduation of her first recruiting class coupled with a cancer diagnosis for her father back on Long Island, along with her unsuccessful attempts to reach her family for two days following Superstorm Sandy, Van Nostrand decided to head back east.

“After you win like that you’re like, ‘What do I do now?’” Van Nostrand said.  “My first recruiting class had graduated that year and I was just burned out. I really was. I believe if you don’t have 100 percent passion for something you shouldn’t do it, especially coaching, because kids rely on you too much. I was also thinking, do I want to stay in D-III and do this? Do I want to go Division I? Do I even want to coach anymore? Then my dad got sick, and Sandy happened, and my family was affected by that. My brother lived in Long Beach, my cousin lives in Long Beach and my family is on Long Island, and not being able to get in touch with your family for 48 hours and not knowing if everybody was OK was very hard. So I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ So I came home.”

Van Nostrand did a three-year stint at the National Collegiate Scouting Association (NCSA) and while enjoying the work, traveling the country and talking to student-athletes and their families about the recruiting process, Van Nostrand wanted something different. Coaching was not an option, but a conversation with a coaching colleague steered Van Nostrand’s career path toward athletic administration.

“It was what I wanted to do, but I was going to be very particular about where I wanted to go. I wanted to stay in Division III and I wanted to feel like I could give back,” Van Nostrand said. “The Pine Manor community was a lot like the Lehman community, and I wanted to come back to a feeling like that, so that’s kind of how I ended up here.”

String of successes

Lehman has had its share of athletic success over the past few seasons, particularly with men’s and women’s basketball and women’s soccer, and Van Nostrand saw a nice fit with Lehman.

“I saw there was an opening here and I did some research on Lehman. Obviously, they have had a lot of success at the DIII level and [Lehman director of athletics] Dr. [Martin] Zwiren has been here for a long time, and I wanted to have somebody who could mentor me and teach me,” Van Nostrand said. “I already knew the coaching part, but the administrative part is something that you have to learn and figure out. So I applied. Came in for an interview and I fell in love with the staff. Everybody here is amazing. Dr. Zwiren is a great mentor and I feel like we have very similar personalities and we get along great.”

So, what does the new Associate Director of Athletics do in her new job?

“Well, I do fields, apparently,” Van Nostrand said with a laugh. “But my main responsibility is compliance. [Adhering] to all the NCAA rules and regulations and all that kind of stuff. Then I do all the game management, so I’m at all the home games and I help coaches with the recruiting process. Kind of a little bit of everything. I love it.”

Despite all her successes on the softball field, Van Nostrand said her coaching days are most likely over, as she enjoys her new responsibilities so much that she doesn’t even consider her job as work.

All in

“Do I miss coaching? ‘No.’ That’s a lie. I do. But I’m really enjoying this,” Van Nostrand said. “I like the administrative end because I know my personality. If I could go back to coaching and be one of those coaches who are like, ‘Hey, we’re .500 , the kids are happy, everybody is happy,’ then I could do it. But I’m not. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to win at it, and I’m going to do everything I can to win. To be a really good coach at this level, it’s all-encompassing. I don’t believe in being half in. You’re either all in or you’re all out. That’s my philosophy. But this job allows me to keep my hands in it and kind of mentor coaches.”

So, what is the best part of Van Nostrand’s new Lehman gig? Aside from lining the soccer field, that is. It is pretty simple, if you ask her.

“The best part is they pay me to hang out and watch college sports and talk to athletes and talk to coaches. It’s a pretty good gig,” Van Nostrand said. “I don’t feel like I go to work. My commute is the hardest part of my job. I live in Long Beach. But once I’m here, it’s not work. I get to talk sports, my co-workers are amazing, and the student-athletes I’ve met are really good, friendly people, really welcoming. Someone once told me if you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life, and they’re right. My friends all laugh at me and say, ‘Aren’t you stressed? And I’m like, no, I come here and I hang out and talk some sports. And today I’m lining a soccer field. I’m in mesh shorts and a tee shirt. And they’re like, ‘Awesome. I’m going to get dressed up and take the train and sit in corporate America.’ This is a pretty sweet gig.”

The Lehman Lightning athletic programs have seen their share of successes in recent years, most notably when the women’s basketball team won the City University of New York Athletic Conference (CUNYAC) championship last year. So, what does Van Nostrand see ahead for Lehman? A higher profile for one thing.

Tournament dreams

“I would like to see all the sports continue to succeed and build the levels of our other programs like baseball and softball,” Van Nostrand said. “I’d like to also take that next step and get an NCAA [Tournament] win. Not necessarily a championship, but a win. Once you do get that tournament win, you put yourself on the regional and national levels. I’m a big-picture person and I’m pretty competitive. CUNY success is wonderful and great, but I think we can do even better than how we are doing now. I think it would be pretty cool if we could put ourselves out there a little bit more.”

Erin Van Nostrand, Sean Brennan

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