Erskine’s Hawkins wins 1,000th game

Head Softball Coach Alleen Hawkins won her 1,000th game as a college coach when the Erskine College Flying Fleet defeated Shorter 5-2 in Due West on April 1.

“I’ve just been extremely fortunate to have really high-quality athletes—kids I probably should never have been able to sign took a chance on us,” Hawkins says as she reflects on reaching the milestone. “They’ve not just made the program better but made me better and made everyone around them better.”

Hawkins is from the small southern Maryland town of Tall Timbers, which sits along the Potomac River just as it merges into the Chesapeake Bay to the south. Her father played baseball and the sport was part of the fabric of her family’s household. Her first job coaching softball was at Chesapeake College, a community college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The year was 1978.

“We started the softball program there,” Hawkins says. “I was there for five years, where we were very successful.” In recognition of her efforts, Hawkins was later named to Chesapeake’s Hall of Fame.

Her next stop took her to South Carolina, but not all the way to Due West. Her former supervisor at Chesapeake had taken a coaching role at Furman and reached out to her as the Paladins were looking for a softball coach.

Hawkins accepted the role in time for the 1983-84 campaign. Furman’s facilities then were a far cry from those of today. She remembers arriving at a grass field with a chicken wire backstop and tied-down bases.

Hawkins spent 13 years at Furman, winning back-to-back Southern Conference championships and coach-of-the-year awards in 1994 and 1995, along with a lengthy string of other accomplishments, including 327 wins.

From there, she was offered the opportunity to start another program, this time in the SEC, at the University of Georgia. Hawkins built the program from the ground up, establishing and improving it competitively in its earliest stages and upgrading its facilities. After four seasons of extensive travel to road games, and by then the mother of three children, Hawkins ended her time in Athens with the full intention of becoming a stay-at-home mom.

Then Erskine intervened. The college reached out to her in the fall semester of 2000 when a coaching candidate fell through late in the summer. She accepted the position and arrived in January 2001. The field was “nothing but lines with bleachers set behind them,” Hawkins says. The head coach has since directed fundraising efforts that have greatly improved the facility during her 25 years in Due West.

Hawkins sees parallels between her students at Erskine and those she encountered in her Furman days.

“The Erskine student is very much like what the Furman student was—very academic. I like when they walk in, and they know this is where they need to be,” Hawkins says.

The academic results back up the sentiment. Last semester, the team included 14 students with a 4.0 GPA, and three players were members of the 2025 Garnet Circle, the school’s list of 25 currently enrolled students who achieved the highest scholastic average during the previous academic year.

The Fleet has also been successful on the diamond, winning the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA) national championship in 2019 and the Conference Carolinas regular season titles in 2019 and 2021. Hawkins has been honored as the conference coach of the year four times, and the individual awards garnered by her players are too numerous to list. Hawkins has been inducted into both the USA Softball of South Carolina Hall of Fame and Erskine’s Flying Fleet Hall of Fame.

Much in college sports has changed during Hawkins’s lengthy career, including the advent of the transfer portal and a shift toward immediate player returns and away from a focus on player development.

“What has happened in sports is that people are not willing to be patient as coaches for player development,” Hawkins says. “People can talk about player development all they want to, but when you’re winning every single day thanks to a bunch of juniors and seniors recycling through the transfer portal, then, in that particular program, there is no player development.”

This year’s team included 12 freshmen, so it experienced the growing pains that come with having a young squad. The team will have 11 more freshmen coming in next year, so most of the roster will be sophomores and freshmen. Those sophomores, however, will be far more experienced than those in a typical program.

Hawkins’s focus at Erskine remains on the development of players and people, in an era when the college-player relationship has become increasingly transactional.

“I take being a mentor and a role model for my girls very, very seriously, in how I’ve lived my life, and sharing of experiences,” she says. “I know when to be tough—when it was needed—but at the same time, I can turn around and give them a hug.”

Fourteen years ago this August, Hawkins lost her husband Eddie to a heart attack. When she saw the overwhelming support for her family from the Erskine community, she had a realization.

“This is where I was supposed to be when that happened. I’ve known that since that day,” she says. “Had I not been here? I don’t know where I’d be. You always end up where you’re supposed to be.”

Erskine is thankful Hawkins is meant to be in Due West.