DAVIS, Calif. --  As it was for many other people, the 10th day of March 2020 represented the last "normal" day for UC Davis head softball coach Erin Thorpe. She guided her Aggies to an 8-3 victory against Pacific on that afternoon, serving as a prelude to the Big West Conference's opening weekend.

One day later, everything changed. The World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 as a worldwide pandemic. Film star Tom Hanks announced on social media that he had tested positive for the disease. An NBA game between Oklahoma City and Utah was canceled upon the announcement that Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive, with the league announcing the suspension of its remaining season shortly after. One by one, several Division I conferences began shutting down their respective basketball tournaments, with the Big West announcing the suspension of all winter and spring sports the next day.

When the university's spring quarter resumed, Aggie softball games were off the calendar, but Thorpe remained a coach. Yes, she still helmed the Aggie softball team, keeping up with her student-athletes through videoconferencing. However, she also reached back to her undergraduate roots and her early interests in becoming a certified master financial coach through Ramsey Solutions. In May, Thorpe created a separate Facebook page on which people can sign up for consultations, or pick up basic tips through her infographics and video content.

Thorpe's interest in this second form of coaching should not come as a surprise, given her background. She graduated from UC San Diego in 2000 with a degree in economics and management science, worked for Wells Fargo for more than two years before going into coaching, and later completed her MBA from Cal Poly Pomona while serving as head softball coach and senior woman administrator at Whittier College.

At the advice of her parents, the former Erin Bridges arrived at UCSD as a computer science major, but quickly pivoted toward managerial economics. "I knew what alley I wanted to focus on," she said. "Whether that was going to take me into athletics or into banking or into managing something else, I knew that was where my direction was."

On the diamond, Thorpe enjoyed an outstanding career as a Triton, earning four All-West Region honors and 2000 All-America accolades. She still ranks among the program's all-time leaders in batting (.362), triples (12) and RBI (97). As a senior, Thorpe set a school season record with a .415 batting average, a standard that lasted for nine years. She also remains one of just four players in UCSD softball history to amass at least 40 runs scored and 40 RBI in the same season, a feat she achieved as a freshman.

After her final game as a student-athlete, Thorpe's career aspirations were largely informed by her father. She worked in banking to pay the bills, but quickly pivoted toward coaching as a gateway into athletics administration. After all, Dan Bridges had made a similar switch when Erin was a child: he coached baseball at UCLA and CalTech before being promoted as the latter school's athletics director in 1989. Bridges held top positions with Pomona-Pitzer, Cal Poly Pomona and San Bernardino Valley College before his appointment as the Cal State L.A. athletics director in January of 2006. He retired from the Golden Eagles helm in 2015, then briefly came out of retirement to serve as an interim dean for the School of Health Sciences at Solano College in Suisin.

With her father working at a string of relatively small athletics programs, Thorpe gained a front-row seat to the world of hands-on administration. She and her sister often were pulled into duty during the busier times, like when Bridges did not have enough staff to cover a basketball and football game playing simultaneously. While certainly challenging moments for her father, such days shaped the interests and skills Thorpe still holds today. 

"I'm naturally analytic," she says. "I like to process things and I like to solve problems. I like to strategize. I'm sure I got a lot of that from my dad, too, just hearing him talk through different problems."

Thorpe's analytical abilities were thrown into action during that first coaching stint at Whittier. The previous coach was Mike McBride, a political science professor and an avid baseball man, who founded the school's softball program in 1979. Thorpe's inaugural season with the Poets was 2003, the very spring before Michael Lewis' best-selling Moneyball put such quantitative diamond thinking into the public consciousness. McBride knows the math of baseball as well as he knows Russian history, the United Nations and human rights; and was quite willing to share it with the Poets' young head coach.

"Sixth inning, you're down by six runs, you get a runner on first. I thought, let's steal her and get her to second base," Thorpe recalls of her conversations with McBride. "He'd say, why steal? You need how many batters to come up, and you need how many runs to score? Why even attempt to give up an out? He taught me those little intricacies of the game, which were super-cool to me."

Thorpe was just two years removed from her All-America senior season. She knew how to play the game, but had never learned the quantitative side of it. However, with Thorpe's fondness for numbers and analytics, McBride was the perfect sidekick with whom to start her coaching career. To this day, Thorpe still thinks of his wisdom during the heat of Division I competition. Sometimes, she says, she hears it when opposing teams run into the same strategic traps she learned to side-step. 

"We're in the seventh inning, we're winning by four, and they're trying to steal. And I think, why steal? I hear myself replaying some of the things he said to me. So I was very fortunate to have that in my position," Thorpe says.

In 2007, after five seasons as Whittier's softball coach and SWA, Thorpe gained a new opportunity: to launch a softball program at Boise State. "It was basically no uniforms, no field, no players, no assistant coaches, no anything." she recalls. "I recruited my entire first team before I hired an assistant coach. When I was strategizing it, I saw that if I miss the recruiting window, I would miss these players. I didn't have time to bring in people and hire, I had to be out recruiting. So I did all of my recruiting first."  

Boise State went 22-30 in its first year, then finished third in the Western Athletic Conference with a 13-8 record in its second. Overall, Thorpe guided the Broncos to a 173-150-1 record in her six years in the Gem State. To this day, she remains grateful for that opportunity but also full of disbelief that it happened. After all, she entered the job with just five years of experience with a D-III program, albeit one she guided to its first winning season in 20 years. 

"The guy that hired me was an ex-military man," Thorpe said. "I really believe he thought they didn't need a great player, they need a good manager. He saw my background and my education, and that helped. But I still don't know what he was thinking, I really don't."

Less of a mystery was Thorpe's appointment as UC Davis' head coach in the summer of 2014. After winning a national title in their final year in Division II, the Aggies had enjoyed some success in the previous decade or so – particularly a Big West title and NCAA Division I postseason berth in 2010. However, they had not enjoyed a winning season as a full-fledged D-I program, and Thorpe's goal was to raise that profile. Once again, her love for problem-solving and strategizing made for an ideal fit.

"Every place has a new set of challenges, so the fun part is identifying what they are, then figuring out what to do to get in ourselves in a position where we compete, year in and year out," said Thorpe. "[UC Davis] was very different. How do we get there? You don't have Boise State football, you don't have Boise State's community. You don't have their athletes-first mentality. So of course there was an adjustment period, but it was tremendously helpful because it gave me different aspects to look at."

In 2018, she led the Aggies to their first winning record in 11 years (27-24). Thorpe followed that with a 39-14 mark in 2019, the program's best since the national-championship season of 2003. She also helped direct a sizable renovation of the team's La Rue Field home, while her teams earned back-to-back NCAA public recognition awards for Academic Progress Rates.

Ultimately, Thorpe's time at UC Davis continues a larger passion: building something up, and making it better. She did this as a student-athlete: she joined a UCSD program that had won 11 games the year before, then helped the Tritons to their first NCAA postseason appearance in six years. Whittier went from a 4-35 team in her first season to a 23-17 record in 2007. Boise State did not have a softball program until Thorpe's arrival, yet she guided the Broncos to three 30-win seasons by the time she left.

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