TACOMA, Wash. — If you ask Cindy Van Hulle what's her favorite sport to coach, don't be surprised if she replies, "Whatever's in season."
 
And why not? Over the years, Van Hulle seemingly has coached just about every sport in every season. Volleyball and cross country in the fall. Basketball in the winter. Softball and track in the spring.
 
But keep the conversation going, and she'll come around to acknowledging that yes, she does have a favorite.
 
"I'm one of those people who throws myself into whatever I'm doing," Van Hulle said. "But if I had to choose one over all of them, I would choose softball."
 
For the past eight years, Van Hulle has chosen to coach that sport at her alma mater of Pacific Lutheran University. She has chosen to do so as an assistant to head coach Traci Barrett – the same Traci Barrett who spent her teen years playing on Van Hulle-coached volleyball and basketball teams at Puyallup's Ferrucci Junior High School, and on her softball team at Rogers High School.
 
This spring, Van Hulle's connection to PLU, to softball, and to Barrett has paid off in a big way. The Lutes, who are No. 19 in this week's NCAA rankings and No. 21 in the latest national coaches poll, will host the Northwest Conference Tournament at PLU Field.
 
The two-day gathering begins on Friday. The top-seeded Lutes, who put together a 32-8 overall record and a 24-4 conference mark, will play the opening game against fourth-seeded George Fox (22-18, 16-12) at 10:00 a.m. That will be followed by No. 2 Linfield (34-6, 22-6) against No. 3 Lewis & Clark (26-14, 21-7) at 12:30 p.m.
 
Pacific Lutheran comes in having won six straight and 13 of its last 14 games.
 
"This is so exciting," Van Hulle said. "We have a lot of freshmen on the team and also have a lot of returning players, and that has really spurred new interest and excitement. The returners have shown the freshmen their leadership, and that has kind of made a whole circle.
 
"I don't think there's anything that we're not capable of," she added. "Their IQ of this game has risen so much."
 
COACHING HERSELF IN THE JAV
Van Hulle has quite an athletics IQ herself – and not just for softball.
 
After graduating from Rogers in 1972, she spent her freshman and sophomore years at Green River Community College in Auburn. She arrived at PLU in the fall of 1974 to continue pursuit of her education degree.
 
That was pre-Title IX and seven years before the 1981 start of the Lutes' softball program.
 
"I thought, 'What can I do that I can throw? Oh, I'll be on the track team,'" Van Hulle recalled. "So I taught myself how to throw the javelin, and I did well at that."
 
The javelin is often regarded as one of the most technique-driven events. Van Hulle was willing to do whatever it took to get better at it … no matter what time of day it was.
 
"I would get up at 5 in the morning. I was student-teaching at the time, so I had to get up early," she said. "I would go over to PLU and run. Then after I was done student-teaching, I would swing by PLU again and watch microfiche of people who were throwing the javelin and taught myself how to do it." (Long before the internet and cloud storage, microfiche was strips or sheets of film with reduced-size images, usually of documents, newspapers, and photos, photos; looking at these images required large microfiche viewers, often found in libraries.)
 
That self-taught jav thrower made it all the way to the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) nationals as a junior in 1975 and took fifth place at 141 feet, 11 inches.
 
"That was really exciting," Van Hulle said. "I got to watch Kate Schmidt (then the American record holder) throw. My eyes were glued on her, trying to figure out what she was doing."
  AN ENDURING CONNECTION
In the late 1980s, one of Van Hulle's students and athletes at Ferrucci was Traci Barrett. It didn't take long for each of them to make an impression on the other one.
 
"She was such a great athlete. It was always a pleasure to be able to teach her and to be able to coach her,' Van Hulle said.
 
At Rogers from 1989-91, Barrett played on Van Hulle's softball team that was always among the state title contenders. (Van Hulle guided the Rams to the large-school state championship in 1983.)
 
"It was incredible to play for her. Our program was a very strong and notable program in Washington and we were at the state tournament every year," Barrett said. "You would do anything to be on her team. She just commands a room with her presence when she walks in the door."
 
Barrett joined PLU as an assistant coach in 2016. She moved up to the head coaching job in 2019.
 
After she did, one of the first people she reached out to was Van Hulle, who by then had retired from teaching and coaching.
 
"I pretty much said, 'I'm not going to do this if you don't do it with me," Barrett said with a laugh as she recalled that conversation. "I think for her, the timing was right, and in her mind, (it was) a little transition in a retirement situation."
 
Van Hulle had her own rather humorous recollection of that same chat.
 
"I did mention to her that I had just retired recently," Van Hulle said. "She said 'No, no, come back.' I think I remember saying, 'How long to I have to consider it? OK, I'll do it.'
 
"It took, like, two seconds," she said, laughing. "There was no doubt in my mind."
 
For Van Hulle, it was the ultimate full-circle moment: back at her alma mater, taking part in a program that didn't even exist when she had been a PLU student, and working with Barrett, whom she had taught, coached, and mentored.
 
"This has been like a dream," she said. "People wish they could do that with other people, and I actually get to live it."
 
SOFTBALL SCIENTIST
Van Hulle brings plenty of know-how to the Lutes' table. One of her areas of expertise is with a kinesthetically-driven motor preferences program that is especially beneficial to the team's hitters.
 
"I watch how each individual moves – how they walk, how they run, how they swing, how they stand when they're just talking to each other," she explained. "That helps me understand what preference they have for how they move. What I try to do is take that information and help them figure out their swing.
 
"When you allow athletes to understand how they swing and how they move, they can understand what they're doing right and not doing correctly and they can make adjustments on their own."
 
Van Hulle also works with PLU's outfielders, while Barrett focuses more on the infielders.
 
"We have almost a new infield. Our outfield is pretty similar to last year," she said. "There is a leadership piece where (the outfielders) understood the program, understood what we wanted, and they were sharing that with the infield. Coach Barrett has done a tremendous job with that infield – it is really, really looking sharp."
 
Barrett just oozes enthusiasm not only for what Van Hulle knows, but for how she shares it.
 
"Seeing her as an assistant, older (and working) with a different generation has been really fun," she said. "She meets them right where they're at in this world that they're in. The same kind of class she carries herself with has never left.
 
"I always tell people that she can coach circles around anyone that I've ever been around. She's the most humble, hard-working, high-level coach that I've been around."
 
And there's certainly no arguing with the results.
 
"She 100 percent can coach every facet of the game," Barrett added. "Once these players walk in the door, there's a road map to getting them to be their best selves, and she's just special at seeing what that is. She works with our outfielders because that was a bigger need when she came in, making our outfield great. She has taken the offense as her own, and we have improved in every single thing we do this year.
 
"We have beaten just about every goal we have set for ourselves, including fielding percentage," she said. "That goal was .980, and we're at .984. And we're about just point-2-5 shy of our batting average goal."
 
GOING LONG … IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE
To do all of this every day, the 72-year-old Van Hulle travels up from Tenino, some 40-plus miles south of campus, where "I have 20 acres and lots of animals and I pretty much don't look like I do at PLU – I look like a farmer," she said, laughing.
 
But then, going long distances is nothing new for Van Hulle. She has run 15 marathons, including Boston and New York.
 
"I thought, 'You're getting old, you're going to get out of shape and you better start doing something,'" Van Hulle said. "I had a wonderful friend who was teaching at the same junior high (Ferrucci) that I was, and we decided we were going to get in shape."
 
They started running together regularly, did a couple of 5K races, "and then suddenly decided it would be a good idea to do a marathon," she said. "We didn't even know what we were talking about."
 
It didn't take Van Hulle long to start enjoying on the preparation process.
 
"I got hooked on the training and the fitness level of it and the camaraderie of running for four hours on a Saturday," she said. "One thing led to another, and pretty soon, I was at 15 and had run different marathons around the country. It was really fun to see different parts of the country and run in different parts of a city that no one sees."
 
This weekend, the only running will be on the basepaths.
 
The tournament champion will earn an automatic berth in the NCAA Regional tournament. (The runner-up will be in the mix for an at-large spot.) Regional winners advance to the best-of-3 Super Regionals, and those eight winners will play in the nationals, set for May 28-June 3 in Salem, Virginia.
 
"I think they're ready for anything," Van Hulle said. "I'm really excited to see how long this season is going to last. I hope we go all the way."
 
No matter what, she is thrilled to have a front-row seat – and a hand putting it all together.
 
"My friendship and coaching time with Traci has exceeded anyone else's wishes," Van Hulle said. "I owe her a great deal and never would have traded any of these moments.
 
"I love coaching softball, I love coaching these athletes, and I love coaching at PLU."
 
That might be Cindy Van Hulle's way of saying that she really does have a favorite sport …
 
… regardless of whatever's in season.