Bringing the team home

In less than a week, the Wausau Softball Club will reveal the results of a community contest to christen its upcoming softball team and cement the team in the history books.

The Wausau Softball Club will be a member of Northwoods League Softball, a spin-off of the Northwoods League, the 26-team baseball league that counts the Wausau Woodchucks among its members. 

Established last year, Northwoods League Softball is the first for-profit women’s summer collegiate softball league.

“[The Northwoods League] wanted to give the opportunities that they have for baseball players to softball players with a softball league,” said Brianne Barta, assistant manager of the Woodchucks, who will be taking on the role of general manager for the Wausau Softball Club.

Barta has been with the Woodchucks since 2021, when she came on as a stadium operations intern.

“It was a lot of overseeing the concessions at the ballpark,” said Barta. After college, she’d sought a career path that would allow her to work “in the operations side of things,” and having worked at a bar through college, she was drawn to the food and beverage aspect of the position.

After a successful internship, Barta was hired on as a full-time manager for operations of food and beverage.

“It was something I really enjoyed in my internship,” said Barta of her duties as food and beverage operations manager. “It was nice to be able to stick on with that in my internship and also with the Woodchucks.”

A little over a year after she signed on with the Woodchucks, Barta was promoted to assistant general manager of the Woodchucks.

Another year, and she was asked to manage a new team: the tentatively named Wausau Softball Club.

Her duties include working with the club’s head coach to recruit the 18 women athletes who will make up the team’s roster, ranging from recent high school graduates freshly admitted to college to a limited number of just-graduated college players. Any athletes with softball college eligibility remaining can feasibly play.

The Wausau Woodchucks were founded in 1993. They, too, relied on the community to help them build their identity, partnering with the Daily Herald for a mascot-naming contest.

Wausau Softball took a leaf from the Woodchucks’ playbook, announcing its Name the Team Contest last December.

“We wanted to be able to involve the community in naming the team,” said Barta. “It’s definitely something you aren’t able to do very often, especially being a new team… The Woodchucks are a huge part of this community, and we wanted the softball team to be as well, so right off the get-go we wanted involving them in that naming process to be something that we do.”

The official name will be one of four finalists listed on the Wausau Softball website: Polar Owls; Snow Dragons; Curd Crushers; or Ignite.

“It feels really, I guess, exciting to be able to bring softball to Wausau here and to start this new team,” said Barta. “I’ve been involved in sports my entire life. I played a bunch of different ones when I was younger. I ran track and cross county in college. It’s always been a part of my life, so to bring high-level college sports to Wausau is really awesome and it’s something that I’m really happy to be a part of.”

As for what she’s most excited about looking forward, Barta had a hard time deciding.

“I think it’s two-part for me,” Barta said. “I’m really excited for these college athletes to have the opportunity to play in the summer league and to play not only in Wausau, for our fans, but in other cities as well, to be able to showcase their talents. I’m also really excited to bring fast-pitch softball to Wausau… High-level fast-pitch softball is not really something we have in this area.”

Whatever team Wausau finds itself host to next week — whether they be Polar Owls, Snow Dragons, Curd Crushers or Ignite — the love of sports, the drive to create world with just as many opportunities for women athletes as men and the passion for the behind-the-scenes logistics — will drive them just the same. As for the rest, that’s up to the team and their hometown fans to figure out. 

The Wausau Softball Club will announce the winning team name on April 9, alongside other plans for the team as it solidifies its identity. The Northwoods League Softball season is expected to run from mid-June–early August.