Marty Gordon
The recent announcements by several high school softball players in our area is a testament to the success on and off the field.
Monday, Christiansburg’s Addison Linkous announced plans to play softball and attend West Virginia Wesleyan. She joined four from Blacksburg who repeated similar intentions over the past week.
Linkous chose the school because of its amazing campus and as she says, gives her an opportunity to major in nursing.
Linkous hopes to play third or first base at the higher level after averaging a .413 batting average this past year as a junior at Christiansburg, while tallying a .647 field percentage.
West Virginia Wesleyan College is a private college in Buckhannon, West Virginia. It has an enrollment of about 900 students from 35 U.S. states and 26 countries.
The college’s athletics teams are the Bobcats, which compete in the NCAA Division II Mountain East Conference, of which it was a founding member in 2013.
This past year, the West Virginia Wesleyan Softball team lost to East Stroudsburg 1-0 in the Atlantic Regional Pod 1 Championship, putting an end to a remarkable season (45-17) for the ‘Cats.
Coach Steve Warner is one of the elite softball coaches in NCAA Division II and ranks fifth nationally among active NCAA Division II coaches in victories with a 1,133-426-2 record during his 30 years at West Virginia Wesleyan. He won his 1,000th game in 2017 at the NCAA Division II World Series as his team finished third in the nation.
Consistency has led Warner’s Bobcat teams to win 20 regular season WVIAC/MEC Championships and 17 WVIAC/MEC Tournament titles. WVWC softball has been a mainstay in postseason competition. Warner’s squads have appeared in 19 NCAA Regionals and five NCAA Super Regionals (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017).
In 2008, Warner assisted Scot Thomas, former head coach of Virginia Tech with the Salem All-Star Team, which competed against the USA Olympic team.
