05/19/2026

FORT MYERS, Fla. — When the dust settled at the UNF Softball Complex in Jacksonville on Saturday, May 9, the Stetson Hatters stood alone atop the Atlantic Sun Conference, hoisting the 2026 ASUN Softball Championship trophy after a 4-0 win over Central Arkansas. For the rest of the conference, the target has officially been painted. Stetson is the program everyone will be chasing next spring.

For Florida Gulf Coast University head coach Lindsay Fico, closing the gap on the frontrunners begins with an honest look at her squad’s postseason run. Navigating the tournament as a 5-seed meant surviving a single-elimination game on Tuesday, May 5, just to reach double-elimination play. After a few days to decompress, Fico reflected on the “postseason DNA” her team forged under pressure.

“I was proud of the way that we fought, especially in that play-in game against Austin Peay,” Fico said, recalling the tight 2-1 victory. “We ended up finding a way to kind of get it done in a really close, high-quality softball game. I was proud of the way that we fought with our backs against the wall.”

However, surviving the play-in threshold takes an immense physical and emotional toll. Looking ahead to her second year steering the Eagles next spring, Fico is already emphasizing the value of the regular-season grind to secure a safer path through the bracket.

“As we get prepared and go into next year—because you’ve got to turn things over pretty quickly—I’d like to focus on doing a better job of positioning ourselves better as we go into the tournament,” Fico noted. “There is no question that the higher you can be as a seed, the better chance you have. Even though I think we’re still going to have that blue-collar mentality of fighting and getting everything that we earn, I do want to put a bigger emphasis on just how important it is to position ourselves in conference play to make sure that we’re positioned the best possible way to make a real run in the tournament.”

Turning things over quickly is an understatement in modern college sports. The final out of the season triggers an immediate, chaotic transition into recruiting and managing roster turnover. Fico didn’t head home to relax; she immediately traveled to Clearwater to scout day one of the JUCO State Championship.

“It’s a bit of a decompress,” Fico admitted. “You try to get away from it a little bit and have some time of reflection and celebrate the things that you did well, and kind of reflect on the things that you want to improve next year. I’ll be honest with you. The chaos surrounding this portal stuff is [intense]—kids are already going to social media and announcing that they’re going to be entering the portal. I don’t know if the NCAA was fully prepared for what that would look like.”

With an eight-player graduating class leaving significant vacancies, the pressure to recruit is immense. Yet, Fico is balancing the influx of new talent with a concerted effort to anchor her current core. Her pitch to keep players from entering the portal centers on culture and a shared identity.

“You’ve got to constantly go back to why you chose FGCU and whether it was a coaching staff or a culture or the community or Fort Myers and being close to the beach,” Fico explained. “You’ve got to constantly remind yourself of why you want to be here. There has to be some idea that’s bigger than just you and your personal accomplishment to stay loyal this day and age… I don’t want to be a coaching staff after the first couple of years that consistently live in the portal. I want to build something with players that want to be here, that want to accomplish something bigger than themselves.”

This emphasis on playing and developing outside the traditional spring window is exactly what Fico expects from her underclassmen. For younger position players like Naples, Florida native Mackenzie Leiti—who led FGCU with 33 RBIs and seven home runs—the offseason is about getting live reps. Fico encourages summer ball opportunities intentionally for players in Leiti’s position.

“It’s a little bit of both,” Fico said when outlining her summer philosophy. “Obviously the players that didn’t get very many opportunities this past season, particularly our freshmen, our younger players, we absolutely, highly encourage them to find a way to play this summer. There’s a ton of leagues out there now. Some of them are even still young enough to play in the travel ball world. Anytime that they can get live reps, wherever it is, that’s what we encourage. What we don’t want to do is kind of start back at square one by the time they’re here in the fall.”

This summer, Leiti is doing exactly that, joining the Manatee Sea Cows in the Florida Gulf Coast League—a 14-team circuit featuring 224 elite collegiate players. The Sea Cows open their season at Palma Sola Field Park on Friday, June 12 at 9:30 a.m. against the Sarasota Loggerheads, launching a month-long grind that wraps up with the postseason in Bradenton from July 8–11.

“I think she’s still growing. Where I saw the most growth is after a couple of tough conversations and some tough weekends we were able to not wear the failure as much and we were able to kind of fake it until we found it a little bit better,” Fico said. “As long as ‘Mack’ kind of stays out of her way from that mental aspect… then Mackenzie’s going to have a really good career.”

While the bats search for live reps on the summer circuit, Fico reflected on the developmental strides her freshman pitching duo of Julia Bacoulis and Tegan Gabrielse made inside the circle by simply absorbing the relentless adversity of a full Division I schedule. Bacoulis led the Eagles with 93 strikeouts, while Gabrielse fanned 31 batters.

“It was more just like the growth over the course of the season,” Fico noted. “It was the first time in both Julia and Tegan’s career that they had faced a good bit of adversity in the circle and whether it was control or new things or the fact that you had film on everybody and everybody knows what you throw, and knows how you have to pitch people backwards the third and fourth time you go through them and things like that. I think it was just growth over the course of the year and having tough meaningful conversations with me or my staff or teammates.”

Navigating that youth in the circle was made possible by an elite defensive anchor behind the plate. To climb the ASUN ladder and catch up to a program like Stetson next May, Fico’s looming offseason challenge centers on replacing strong production out of an eight-player graduating class—none more glaring than the massive vacancies left by senior catcher Sietske Drijvers and center fielder Olivia ‘Oli’ Black.

Drijvers provided the defensive blueprint by throwing out baserunners at a historic clip, setting the FGCU single-season record with 17 runners caught stealing in 2026. Meanwhile, Black capped off a legendary career in Fort Myers as the program’s Division I career stolen base leader, becoming just the seventh player in conference history to cross the 100-career stolen base milestone while anchoring the outfield with a .990 fielding percentage.

“Based on the sheer numbers of players that we had graduate we’ve got to replace eight spots,” Fico explained, calculating the roster math. “We don’t have a whole lot of knowledge of if there’s going to be any more that kind of enter the portal and it’s still something that’s kind of up in the air a little bit, but we’re looking to add another six to eight (players) to the roster on top of the six freshmen that are coming in because we’ve got the ability to do it from a scholarship standpoint and the ability to add it to make sure that we maximize our roster numbers.”

The introductory “PR campaign” of Fico’s first year is over. With her feet firmly underneath her and a clear blueprint to replace her departing stars, the hunt to return FGCU to the top of the ASUN is officially underway.