8 to great: How MJC softball went from not having a team to conference champs
Donnie Donaldson remembers the story of the Modesto Junior College softball team with eight and a half players.
As the story goes, nine players regularly showed up to practices but just eight could play games during the week. One player could play games only on weekends because of work obligations.
That was in 2019 and the Pirates decided not to field a team, saving a year of eligibility for those who wanted to play in the future.
That season, Donaldson was coaching at Waterford High School, leading the Wildcats to a 19-9 overall record, a second-place finish in the Southern League and a deep run in the Division V Sac-Joaquin Section playoffs. His daughter Alyssa, was a senior and on the roster.
The next season, Donaldson was leading the Pirates, tasked with rebuilding a program that hadn’t been to the postseason since 2007 and hadn’t finished with a winning record since 2012. Alyssa, who had planned to play at Merced College, joined her dad at MJC instead.
“The football coach, coach Stivers, calls me up and says, ‘Hey, the softball job is opening up and we’re doing interviews and we want to fill it quick,’” Donaldson said of how he got the MJC job in the summer of 2019.
He remembers being offered the job “a couple of hours” after his interview.
The Pirates improved each year with Donaldson at the helm, posting a winning record in 2021. But they could not make headway in the ultracompetitive Big 8 Conference, which featured teams with years of NorCal playoff experience.
Until this season.
Under Donaldson, the Pirates finished the regular season with a 24-12-1 overall record, by far one of the best in school history, and a 15-6 conference record. After a 3-1 win over Delta College in the regular season finale Tuesday, the Pirates secured a share of the Big 8 Conference title. It is the first Big 8 title in school history. Earlier this season, they clinched a spot in the postseason for the first time since 2007.
The Pirates will participate in the NorCal playoffs for the first time since 2007. As one of the top seeds in the region, they hope to have a home game. They finished the regular season with the same conference record as American River College, but will be awarded the higher seed in the playoff seed because the Pirates won the season series, 2-1.
They made the turnaround with just four returners from last season. It is a team made almost entirely of local talent. Players from Tracy, Ceres, Turlock, Modesto and other Stanislaus District cities have come together to transform the Pirates from a 16-23-1 team in 2024 to a 24-win outfit. They have also more than doubled their conference win total from last season, going from 6 to 15.
“Last year, we were pretty much the bottom of our conference, out of the playoffs, playing wiffle ball and doing fun stuff (at practice) just to finish the season. We were trying to be spoilers,” Donaldson said. “This year, we were right in the mix at the top of the conference. The girls are still focused, we’re still having hard practices.”
From Dutch Bros. to state stats leader
Brooklyn Heffernan has been one of the most dominant pitchers in the Big 8 all season. The 2022 Ceres High graduate played her freshman season at San Francisco State University but suffered a back injury that she said still hasn’t been fully diagnosed.
“We still don’t know what exactly it is,” she said. “It’s still persistent now.”
But she battled through to play for the Pirates, even though she didn’t think it would ever happen.
When Heffernan came back from San Francisco after the 2023 college season, she thought her softball career was over. She was going to take a year off and then just be a student. She got a job at Dutch Bros. and was coming to terms with the fact that her connection to softball would be watching from the bleachers and talking with Pirates players who came to get coffee.
“I work at Dutch Bros. down the street and they’d always come by after practice and be like, ‘Hey, you should totally come out,’” Heffernan said.
One of Donaldson’s daughters, Kaitlyn, played collegiately and connected with Heffernan. Eventually, Donaldson himself reached out.
“I said no multiple times,” Heffernan said with a laugh.
When she finally agreed to come back to the sport, one of the first calls she made was to her former Ceres coach and current MJC softball recruiting coordinator, Mike Corsaut. Heffernan called to tell him the good news but also, Corsaut said, to ask him for a bat. When she returned to the Central Valley after her season in San Francisco, she was so finished with softball that she got rid of all of her gear.
Now, she’s glad she said yes. Heffernan is one of two pitchers with over 15 wins and under a 1.99 earned run average. She has the most wins in the Big 8 (19) and boasts a 1.88 ERA over 31 appearances. She is also one of the few Big 8 pitchers who hits, batting fifth in the Pirates’ lineup.
“It’s a sport you’ve played your whole life, so realizing you ended on such a bad note ... definitely hit a little hard for me,” she said. “Knowing I was coming back to such a good environment and already kind of knowing some of the girls, I was like, ‘Well, it can’t hurt to try and if I really don’t like it, I don’t have to play.’”
Donaldson brought Heffernan in with two other players, Kesaia Faasisila and Katelyn Bridgeman, who stepped in and have been some of the team’s top offensive players.
Faasisila, a West High graduate, suffered an injury and originally decided she didn’t want to play anymore. She now starts at center field and is the team’s leader in batting average and stolen bases. Bridgeman starts at second base for the Pirates, returning after playing one year at Division I Utah Valley in the Western Athletic Conference.
“I ended up messaging them and saying, ‘Hey, can you guys just meet me at MJC and let’s have a chat about potentially playing softball one more year and let’s see how it goes,’” Donaldson recalled.
“We all knew each other and we were like, ‘Well what do you think?’” Heffernan said. “And then we were kind of like ‘OK.’”
Continuing a connection
Kayleen Zayehmoureh and Sophia Coronado never played each other in high school. Zayehmoureh, a catcher and four-year varsity player from Pitman in Turlock, and Coronado, a four-year varsity shortstop from Kimball in Tracy, went to high schools in different Sac-Joaquin Section leagues and divisions with campuses separated by over 50 miles.
But their journeys to the Pirates are similar.
Both thought they were done with the sport but came back, using the softball as a way to stay connected to deceased family members. They are two of four returning players from last season and both are two-year starters, team captains and catalysts of this year’s turnaround.
Zayehmoureh lost her dad to cancer during her senior year of high school and through the loss and disappointment, she played through the pain. That year, Pitman and Turlock put their rivalry aside, honoring her father, wearing blue ribbons with his initials on their batting helmets. There was also a moment of silence in his honor prior to the game.
Zayehmoureh hit a two-run home run in the game.
“I knew that he was with me on that one,” she said in 2022. “It was for him.”
After graduating from Pitman, she planned to play at San Mateo, but moving after losing her father was tough. She moved back and took a gap year before attending and playing for MJC. Last season was her freshman year.
“I woke up one morning and was like, ‘I think I want to play again’ and I called Donnie,” she said. “I talked to him at a couple of high school travel ball tournaments and (Donaldson) was really nice. I think part of me also wanted to play because that was something that kept me close to my dad.”
Donaldson said not many teams want to run on Zayehmoureh, and the stats back it up. The catcher has just 17 stolen-base attempts on the season and she ranks seventh in the Big 8 Conference with a .227 caught-stealing percentage. She has the highest caught-stealing percentage of any player in the conference with over 15 stolen-base attempts.
Coronado lost her uncle, one of her biggest softball supporters, to suicide during her senior year of high school. She said after some bad experiences playing the sport, she nearly quit, but stuck with it.
“It kind of made me question should I (play) or should I not,” Coronado said. “But one thing we bonded over was softball. It was kind of my way of staying close to him. So I knew if it was up to him, he’d want me to keep playing.”
Coronado had her options. She could have gone to any school in the Big 8 after a standout career at Kimball, where she hit .397 with 104 hits over her four-year career. She was named Valley Oak League co-offensive Player of the Year as a junior and a first team All-League shortstop as a senior. But Donaldson recruited her and spoke to her as a person, not just a softball player.
“You can’t really ask for more from a coach,” Coronado said. “He’s very understanding and there for you on and off the field. He doesn’t just care about you as a player, he cares about you as a person. … When I came for my visit, it felt like home.”
Coronado was an All-Conference second-team player last season and this year is one of the team’s leaders in batting average (.371), hits (43), runs scored (35) and stolen bases (13). She has a quick throwing release as a middle infielder and reacts well to the ball. Coronado has a .897 fielding percentage and a team-high 59 assists.
“Turning a program around is something you take pride in,” she said. “I knew here, that was what we had to do. And having Donnie have my back, I knew it was possible.”
The postseason is next
The team’s success has brought individual awards as well. This week, Donaldson was named the Big 8 Coach of the Year. Heffernan was named the Big 8 Pitcher of the Year and first-team all-conference. Bridgeman and Kesaia Faasisila were named to the all-conference first team. Coronado and Emily Tyler were named second-team members and Zayehmoureh and Freankie Paz were all-conference honorable mention.
Coronado thought this team could be good from the start.
For the rest of the Big 8 and NorCal, though, it took some convincing. They won some big nonconference games, but it wasn’t until they beat regularly dominant Big 8 opponents like Sacramento City College and Delta College that the entire conference started to take notice.
Last season, Delta, Sacramento City, Sierra, Cosumnes River College and American River College all made the 16-team 2024 3C2A NorCal Play-in and Regionals out of the Big 8. This season, the Pirates finished an impressive 12-5 against those teams.
Now, they wait for their seed in their first NorCal appearance in nearly two decades. As the No. 6 team in Northern California, they hope to secure a first-round home game. The postseason kicks off Friday, May 2.
“When we started the season, no one batted an eye at us just because of our previous years,” Zayehmoureh said. “As we made it through our first time in conference and beat all these teams we had never beaten before, it put a target on our back. It’s scary but that’s what makes it so fun to be on a winning team like this.”
