Showalter Takes Coaching Talents Overseas

BOONE, N.C. -- App State assistant softball coach Shane Showalter possesses over 20 years of coaching experience. While helping compile four consecutive winning seasons in the High Country, he has also been coaching the Greek Women's Olympic Team.
 
A coaching career that has included stops at Colorado College and Colorado State University, Pueblo also featured a five-year stint at Austin Peay State University. That is when he met his friend Tony Foti, the Greeks' head coach.
 
Foti liked Showalter's coaching style and the two became close. "I didn't find it. It found me," Showalter said. It was a unique opportunity that he could not pass up.
 
He recently returned from Spain, where the Greeks compiled a 7-3 record in the 2022 Women's European Championships. Showalter's squad won four of its last five games and ended the tournament on a three-game winning streak with a 13-9 victory over France before a pair of one-run victories over Ireland and Germany concluded tournament play.
 
Despite a successful outing against some of the world's best teams, the preparation and execution does not come without its challenges. "Most of our team is American-Greek. Softball in Greece is very, very new. They don't even have a softball field anywhere in Greece."
 
With softball just beginning to grow in Greek culture, it leads to additional hurdles that many of the Greeks' competitors have not dealt with. "The top teams are funded very well and we're raising money just to get to the tournament," he added.
 
"The biggest challenge is we aren't together at all until a week before the tournament. Then we get together and then we train for a week and try to go compete with these teams that are playing together every day all year long."
 
"We're not going into the tournament at peak level but we're able to go up there with a week of training and win seven games."
 
Showalter knows that seven wins could have easily been eight. A 2-1 defeat to Spain was one that he said he wishes he could have back. "We went 7-3 and probably should have been 8-2. We lost a critical game to Spain; in every way you could imagine we should have won the game, but we didn't."
 
However, mission accomplished.
 
Winning seven out of ten games was a stretch good enough for the Greeks to secure a spot in next year's Canada Cup. Tournament action will begin next summer.