Joan Joyce
Joan Joyce
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Reprint from The Path to the Gold by Mary L. Littlewood
If any one individual dominated a team sport, it was Joan Joyce. Joyce started to play softball at age eight because her father played and it was the only team sport available at the time. At 13, Joan tried out for the Raybestos Brakettes and playing sparingly. At the age of 15 or 16, she received the suggestion that started her up the ladder of stardom. Joan was pitching, and a man who was working on a field for a Little League tournament suggested she try pitching slingshot instead of windmill. Former Cardinal pitchers Johnny Spring and Howie Weiland showed her how to hold the ball, and she practiced, practiced and practiced.
After graduating from high school, Joyce attended Southern Connecticut State Teachers College. In 1963, she left Connecticut to attend Chapman College. While in California, she played three years for the renowned Orange Lionettes, winning 80 games and losing only six. She hurled 21 no-hitters and compiled an 11-2 record in national championship play.
Joan played eight years for the Brakettes before playing three years for the Orange Lionettes. She then rejoined the Brakettes and played another nine years. In 17 years with the Brakettes, she compiled a record of 429 wins and 27 losses. She fanned 5,677 batters in 3,397 1/3rd innings and hurled 105 no-hitters and 33 perfect games. She yielded only 102 earned runs in 476 games for an earned run average of 0.21.
Besides her pitching, Joyce was an outstanding hitter, compiling a Brakettes’ .327 lifetime average and leading the team six times in batting. Her highest batting average was .406 in 1973. In 1971, she was the leading hitter in the ASA Women’s Major Fast Pitch national Championship with a .467 average as well as sharing the most valuable player award with Donna Lopiano.
In 1974, a year before retiring from amateur competition, Joyce added to her legendary career by hurling the USA team (represented by the Brakettes) to the ISF world championship. It was the first time the United States won the gold medal. Joyce was undefeated in five games. She pitched 36 consecutive scoreless innings with two perfect games, one no-hitter and two one-hitters. Her earned run average was 0.00 and she had 76 strikeouts. While she was unbeatable on the mound, Joyce also was among the best offensively, batting .407 and driving in 10 runs.
After completing her amateur career in 1975 with an undefeated season, Joyce turned her efforts toward helping to launch a professional women’s league in 1976. The league lasted until 1979. Joyce’s team, the Connecticut Falcons, won the championship each year. At the same time, Joyce was pursuing a career on the LPGA tour.
As an amateur player, Joyce was named to the ASA All-American team 18 consecutive years and eight times was named the tournament’s most valuable player. She was a member of 12 national championship teams. In national championship play, she won 67 games and lost 10, and had an earned run average of 0.25. She shared or owned outright six Brakette pitching records, including most wins in a season (42 in 1974), most no-hitters in a national tournament (two in 1958, 1961, 1970, 1971 and 1973), most perfect games in a national tournament (one in 1961), most shutouts (38 in 1974) and the longest game (29 innings in 1968).
In May of 1994, Joyce returned to coaching and guided Florida Atlantic University to a 33-18 record. She was named the Trans America Athlete Conference Coach of the Year and the Palm Beach County Coach of the Year. In 1995, she coached the team to a 37-32 record. Joyce also coaches the FAU golf team and in January, 1996, assumed the senior woman administrator duties.
Joyce was inducted into the National Softball Hall of Fame in 1983. Besides being a member of the National Softball Hall of Fame, Joyce is a member of the Connecticut Fast Pitch Hall of Fame, the Connecticut Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, the Hank O’Donnell Hall of Fame and the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1976, she was runner-up for the Women’s Sports magazine athlete of the year award.
In 1996, Joan was one of 24 ASA Hall of Famers to attend the debut of softball as an Olympic sport at Golden Park in Columbus, Georgia.
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Softball loses a legend in Joan Joyce
Softball loses a legend in Joan Joyce
Graham Hays - March 27, 2022
Florida Atlantic University coach, softball legend and sports pioneer Joan Joyce passed away over the weekend. Joyce, who won her 1,000th game as a coach on March 18, was 81.
To understand Joyce’s story is to understand the history of women’s sports in this country. She was already a legend when Title IX passed in 1972 — more than a decade after she struck out Ted Williams in an exhibition softball game. She was already a professional athlete and a women’s sports legend by the time the NCAA finally and belatedly followed through on the promise of Title IX and brought women’s college sports under its umbrella in 1982.
She wasn’t the product of Title IX. She was the inspiration for it. Along with names like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Althea Gibson, Bertha Tickey, and Billie Jean King, her excellence demanded equality.
The sport she still coached with distinction until her death is a constant reminder of Title IX’s transformative effect. On the 50th anniversary of the landmark legislation, the television broadcasts, packed stadiums, social media engagements and even name, image and likeness opportunities in contemporary college softball speak to how a sport continues to grow. Yet Joyce’s presence in the dugout, as far from the money and lights of the major conferences as it was, offered its own constant reminder of what made Title IX not just possible but necessary.
She played, and equality followed. Not the other way around.
Born in Connecticut shortly before World War II, Joyce first made a name in softball as a pitcher with the Raybestos Brakettes. One of the most successful teams in the history of any sport, the Brakettes of Stratford, Connecticut, dominated the sport through the 1950s, 60s and 70s of her youth. When the first ISF World Championship took place in 1965, the Brakettes represented the United States, effectively doubling as the national team.
And it was while she was with the Brakettes in 1961 that she faced Williams in Waterbury, Connecticut, in front of a crowd bigger even than those that now flock to Hall of Fame Stadium in Oklahoma City for the Women’s College World Series.
“I remember the crowd going crazy — but after all, it was in my hometown,” she told ESPN on the 50th anniversary of the game. “In my opinion, that’s what made me famous more than anything.”
The numbers from her playing career — more than 150 no-hitters, 50 perfect games, 750 wins — don’t even require context. Like Satchel Paige, the numbers write their own legend.
Joyce was part of the first post-Title IX attempt at professional softball, playing in the International Women’s Professional Softball Association that King helped launch. But she was already a professional athlete by then, having joined the LPGA Tour in the 1970s. She didn’t have a background in golf, taking up the sport as an adult. She was just that good of an athlete.
It’s why she also represented the United States in basketball in the 1960s and was a more than passable volleyball player.
Imagine some combination of Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown and Bob Gibson taking over as coach of a college sports program and you have some sense of who FAU hired when she left pro golf in 1995. Yet Joyce, whose softball team went 33-18 in her first season and who endured just three losing seasons in Boca Raton before the pandemic, operated largely under the radar. Even as she won 12 conference championships, made 11 NCAA Tournament appearances, was an eight-time coach of the year in her conference and won 1,000 games.
Anniversaries of milestones sparked occasional stories, and those who knew the story revered her — former FAU All-American pitcher Kylee Hanson ended up at the school, in small part, because her dad watched Joyce pitch for the Connecticut Falcons in the professional league. But for the most part, even as the sport boomed in Florida and throughout the SEC footprint after the 1996 Olympics, her name slipped out of the spotlight. She never seemed to care all that much. She liked her life in Boca Raton, far more interested in competing than retiring.
“Our program has been pretty successful,” Joyce said in 2016. “It really comes down to having the pitching staff that I need. I believe most schools are not going to win World Series unless they have really good pitching staffs. … Can we go into a Florida regional and knock off Florida? Absolutely. If we had to play them a 10-game series, we probably couldn’t win it. But if we had to go in and play them one or two games, can we win? You know, that’s a crapshoot, as far as I’m concerned.”
Those who played for her came to know the legend — Hanson once joked that she only heard about the Williams strikeout once a day. But mostly they came to know a woman with the wisdom of a life boldly lived.
“We have a lot of discussions about Dunkin Donuts,” Hanson said in 2016. “I’m not even kidding, we really do talk about coffee quite a lot. But I can talk to her about pretty much anything. If I have anything going on with my family, my friends or even my teammates, I’ve been able to talk to her about anything. We have a lot of bullpen conversations that don’t always relate back to softball.”
It is a bittersweet legacy that Joyce was among a group of pioneers who dreamed so big and excelled to such a degree that they gave future generations the luxury to forget them. Some of today’s players may know the name. Even fewer probably know exactly what she did. But we forgive that in youth. We only ask them to be good stewards of what those before left them.
“It’s all about the shiny things these days and Joan Joyce is not shiny,” former FAU All-American pitcher Nikki Myers said in 2016. “She’s not going to show up in all of her Nike gear and her fancy warm-up suit. She doesn’t have all the shiny things. So I would expect that most of this generation, the really good kids, would not know who she was and would overlook her.
“I think that when people do finally figure out who she is, then she commands the respect.”
Few athletes ever did more to earn it.
In losing Joyce, softball lost part of its soul. But perhaps it can at long last appreciate the legend who helped shape not only a sport but a world for women in sports.
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