Ashley Chastain Woodard: 'It’ll stick with me for a long time that we came short'

Holding back the tears, Ashley Chastain Woodard sat at the podium and looked down as she gripped the brim of her white South Carolina visor. The pain in her voice came out when she began to speak.

“I just have so much gratitude for the year and for the season and just for everyone that was a part of it,” she said to begin her opening statement. “Ending a season is never easy, and you work really hard to play as long as you can.”

In her first year back at South Carolina, Chastain Woodard led the Gamecocks to places they hadn’t been. After being picked to finish last in the SEC, they won 44 games, became a top-eight seed and hosted the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

Despite the good of this season, Chastain Woodard was sick to her stomach seeing it end the way it did. South Carolina fell one win short of making it to the Women’s College World Series after a 5-0 loss to UCLA in the Columbia Super Regional on Sunday.

An opportunity was right there. After winning Friday, the Gamecocks were one out away from completing a sweep and punching their ticket to Oklahoma City. However, a three-run lead in the seventh inning was erased in a brutal game two loss. Between the last two losses, it’s a tough pill for her to swallow.

“It’ll stick with me for a long time that we came short. I can tell you that,” Chastain Woodard said. “I can say that I will hold on to that for a while.”

The day will come when she moves on from the season-ending heartbreak and looks to next year. And that’s where her focus will be soon enough. While she’ll reflect on how great things were this season, she doesn’t want to experience this tough feeling again.

“I just really want to evaluate the year, and it’s like, okay, at the end of the day, what are the things that kept us out of Oklahoma?” she said. “Like, what are those things, and really evaluate that. The staff and I will have those conversations about, okay, how can we get better?”

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While the ending wasn’t what she wanted, she knows this could be the beginning of something special. As she’s pointed out before, no one expected South Carolina to reach this point, especially not with a first-year coach. But that’s exactly what happened, and it’s what makes the future an exciting prospect for her to think about.

On top of exceeding all expectations, Chastain Woodard found something else along the way. After spending her college career here, she was away for more than a decade working at other schools as an assistant before becoming the head coach at Charlotte. Being back in Columbia, though, has rekindled her gratitude for Columbia and everything that South Carolina has meant to her.

“I just love this place so much. In the process of building the team and the wins and the losses, I fell back in love with this place,” Chastain Woodard. “I’m just really excited for the future. I really am.”

As the season ends and summer begins, it’s shaping up to be a busy offseason for Chastain Woodard and her staff. The transfer portal, which is already open, will remain open through June 16. The Gamecocks will be losing seven players who are out of eligibility, plus any others who decide to transfer.

But she’ll have a lot of players, already ready to do more next year, coming back to South Carolina. As Chastain Woodard said, this year was about laying the foundation of who they will be from here on out.

“I think it set the expectations for us. I think it has transformed the way that people look at South Carolina, and all we can do is build off of it,” said starting catcher Lexi Winters, who will return for her senior season in 2026. “I think that we’ll take a lot of the things that we learned from mistakes and all the successes that we had this year, and we’ll take them into next year.”

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