Bri Ellis made winning SEC Freshman of the Year look effortless in 2022, but all the unprecedented success of the young team was a heavy weight on the slugger's shoulders.
Her .302 batting average, 115 total bases (second most by a freshman in program history) and freshman program-record 20 home runs tell a story of its own, but the 2023 Preseason All-SEC pick has a story that started with her first home run ball at age nine.
Unfamiliar territory
Growing up a Texas A&M fan and taking pitching lessons from College World Series hurler Amanda Scarborough, just about everything has changed from her childhood days in Houston, Texas to now, her college days at first base – everything except her love for the game.
Today, No. 77 is a fan favorite and is becoming the face of Auburn softball, but she couldn't even tell you where Auburn was before the softball team's 2015 College World Series run.
"I always tell people, but they don't really understand: Auburn was, like, super unfamiliar to me," Ellis said. "I probably didn't even know that Auburn was a school in the SEC until they went to the World Series. I remember when my coach told me Auburn was interested in me in the recruiting process, I had to look up where it was because I had no clue about it before."
She quickly found out, and she ended up committing to Auburn even after visiting the University of Alabama, a softball powerhouse, which was the only time she entered the state before college.
She was an immediate stand-out for Auburn at a previously-vacant first base position.
The future is in good hands
There were eight freshmen and two seniors on the 2022 Auburn softball team. The 2021 team had a 27-24 season and went 7-17 in SEC play. As a result, Auburn came into last season unranked but it quickly flipped the narrative and earned a name for itself.
Now, the team has an identity. Along with that comes intimidation factor, which Ellis regards as a "big deal."
With low expectations and out of the national spotlight, the team went off for 86 home runs last season, ranking 12th in the nation and recording the third-highest home run total by a freshman class in Auburn history. Ellis, along with the rest of her freshman class, led them to a Regional bid at Clemson.
"The numbers [our freshman class] got last year, for what we were given and what was expected of us, was honestly impressive," Ellis said. "I was not expecting us to do that. But, I mean, we just went out there and started hitting."
Inside look at the Clemson Regional
After defeating Louisiana in game one of the Regional, the offense went flat and was blanked 1-0 by Clemson. In an elimination game, the season came to an end versus the Rajin' Cajuns when Auburn let an early lead slip versus Louisiana, losing 4-3.
According to Ellis, it was a story of a team that wasn't sure how much energy to conserve early in the season, so they ran out of gas late.
"I think about [getting eliminated in the Regional] a lot because I just remember we started that game so well," Ellis said.
She recalled the scene like she was watching it on film.
Nelia Peralta got starting pitcher Shelby Lowe a first-inning run to build off of with an RBI single before Lindsay Garcia brought in a second run on a sacrifice fly in the top of the second inning. When the arrow flipped downward on the second, however, Louisiana swung the momentum just enough that it was more than what Auburn could handle.
"All of a sudden, something clicked, and it started going downhill," Ellis said.
Ironically, the long ball sunk the ship for Auburn. After Lowe sat down the first three Louisiana batters consecutively, Melissa Mayeaux stepped into the batter's box in the second and sent a 3-1 pitch over the wall in left-center. Louisiana repeated with another solo shot the next inning, and then a two-run dagger in the fifth inning meant the Tigers had to fight from behind to survive.
"I just remember [when we were down 4-2], being so drained and so exhausted that, at that point in the season, it was hard to come back from that," Ellis said. "Like, it was – I felt like I didn't have it in me or whatever to turn it around and come back and win that game. It was the weirdest thing. That's never happened before."
Ellis had one final chance. She came up to bat with two runners on base and one out, down by two in the final inning. If anyone could give Auburn the lead with one swing of the bat, it was her, considering she'd hammered two "Bri Bombs" to lift Auburn to a game one win the day before. She was able to make contact but the force behind the ball wasn't enough.
Her high fly to left fell just short of the wall and was caught. Kelsey Schmidt tagged and scored from third but freshman Jesse Blaine had the same fate, ending the team's season with two one-run losses in one day.
Workhorses get tired, too
Ellis is a workhorse at first base for the Tigers. She started 56 of 57 games for them in 2022. This entailed 16 away games and 11 double-headers. There were plenty of bus rides, team hangouts and more practices than she can count. The team practiced every day except for Mondays.
That helped a young team bond rapidly, but a team with expectations in the shallow end got carried away when they earned unforeseen success early in the year. Ellis was at the head of it.
"I think I went too hard," Ellis said. "I think I practiced way too much on my own and put too much pressure on myself outside of the game or outside of the Regional and, I mean, you just can't do that.”
She was more than willing to put in the work, as her results showed. She became a staple at the cleanup spot in Auburn's lineup, but also made the First-Year SEC Honor Roll in her freshman year as an engineering major.
"I look back to last year, and I literally had no idea what I was getting into," Ellis said. "They always tell you, 'Oh, the SEC is hard,' and all this stuff, but every single game is a cat fight. It's exhausting physically and mentally and then schoolwork is looming in the back of my mind.”
Time to run it back
When the 2023 campaign gets underway on Friday, the Preseason All-SEC pick will do it with a lighter workload.
Last year, she majored in mechanical engineering and often found herself doing homework on bus rides and immediately after road trips. It got to the point where she felt like she wasn’t able to be “100% there” during mid-week games.
To manage the exhaustion, she is now working with an academic strategist, and she changed her major to business analytics. A big point of emphasis for the team this season is setting telescopic and microscopic goals – ones that take limited energy into account as a long season looms.
"My big, main end goal for myself is I want to be an All-American this year," Ellis said. "This year, no numbers – I'm trying my best not to focus on, like, home run numbers. I'm really trying to focus on batting average because if I want to, you know, be up there, it's going to take batting average, not so much home runs."
As a whole, Ellis said the team isn't satisfied with not making it beyond the Regional, but they came out of it with a new standard for Auburn softball.
“I think for us to get to where we want to go this year, which is obviously the World Series, we need to host a Regional, and on top of that, we have every opportunity to win the SEC Tournament and be regular-season champs,” Ellis said. “There were a bunch of teams last year that kind of surprised everyone: like Stanford beat Alabama in their Regional.
“So many teams who aren’t big-name programs had really successful seasons. So, at least for me, it shows that it’s possible and you can’t just think ‘Oh, because we don’t have amazing program history, like Oklahoma, we can’t go to the World Series.’ That is motivation to us. That it's possible.”
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