By Jake Trotter, ESPN Staff Writer May 31, 2024 at 10:05pm ET
CloseJake Trotter covers the Cleveland Browns for ESPN. He joined ESPN in 2011 to cover college football. Previously, he worked for The Oklahoman, The Austin American-Statesman and The Middletown (Ohio) Journal. You can follow him on Twitter at @Jake_Trotter.
Editor’s note: This story was originally posted before the elimination game between Duke and Alabama and has been updated after the Blue Devils were eliminated from the 2024 Women’s College World Championship.
OKLAHOMA CITY — Duke coach Marissa Young kept looking around the Blue Devils dugout, but her husband, James Lamar, was nowhere to be seen in the stands.
The Blue Devils softball team was playing the biggest game in the team’s short history, taking on Stanford University in the 2023 Super Regional. There was no way Lamar, a travel softball coach who has coached his two daughters and several Duke University players in high school, was going to miss the game. But he wasn’t there.
Young knew something was wrong, but she still had games to coach and little did she know how her life would change.
A year later, on opening day of the Women’s College World Series on Thursday, Young again scoured the stadium looking for Lamar, this time until the third inning when she finally found him sitting in a wheelchair in the first-base concourse.
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“Softball has been our life since we met,” Young told ESPN on Friday morning. “He’s a big reason why I’m here as a coach. He’s our biggest fan and he’s worked so hard. I’m glad he got to enjoy and experience this with us. It’s really special.”
Young, a former star pitcher at the University of Michigan, is now a rising coach. Duke hired her in 2015 to launch its softball program. The Blue Devils began playing in 2018. Three years later, she led the team to the postseason.
This year, Young led Duke to its first-ever WCWS appearance and became the first Black head coach to arrive in Oklahoma City.
And she did it all while raising four children and caring for a husband who has been fighting for his life and health since last year’s super regionals.
“She’s one of the strongest women I’ve ever met,” said Duke star Cassidy Card, who played at Lamar in high school. “She comes on the field with a smile on her face and gives us all her attention. … She’s very inspiring.”
Before Duke’s second super regional game last year, Lamar started feeling sick and thought he might have pneumonia again, since he’d had it before. The couple’s oldest son, Braylon, took him to the emergency room, but Lamar didn’t tell his family he was in the hospital until after the game because he didn’t want to distract Young or the Blue Devils.
After Stanford beat the Blue Devils, Young heard the news and rushed to the hospital. It turned out Lamar had a heart attack, which led to a host of other health issues. He was put on life support and underwent countless surgeries. Eventually, he received a heart and kidney transplant. He was hospitalized for months. Young spent the fall away from the team so he could be with Lamar until he could return in time for the season.
“We leaned on our faith,” Young said, who listened to gospel music to stay hopeful and took 30-minute walks around campus to stay sane. “Obviously, part of it was having an amazing medical team at Duke, and we just had to lean on our family. My parents are amazing and took really good care of their kids, so I was able to be in the hospital 24 hours a day and help take care of James. But it was really, really hard…” [It] It’s still tough.”
Young missed his players, he missed coaching them, but as his players pointed out, Young is tough — a toughness that Patty Gasso, the Oklahoma coach who beat Duke in Game 1 of the WCWS, saw when she scouted Young out of California 25 years ago.
“I knew she was going to be something really special because she was such a competitive player,” Gasso said of Young, who was named Big Ten Conference Player of the Year in 2003. “But to me, it’s more than softball. She’s a great example of a woman who fights for her family, she fights for her team, so I respect the way she overcame all the odds to get her team to this point.”
Courtesy of Marissa Young
The Blue Devils have come a long way. The same can be said for Young and Lamar. They met right after college. She was going to play professional softball in Texas. Her workplace was throwing her a going-away party. Lamar happened to be there, and the two hit it off right away.
Young had planned to go to law school and become a lawyer, but Lamar persuaded her to become a coach. When her daughters were old enough to play softball, she reciprocated by telling Young to stop coaching football and coach the softball team instead. Eventually, Lamar became the coach of the Lady Dukes, an under-18 traveling softball team. Young’s oldest daughter, Leila, a high school senior, plans to play softball at Florida. Young’s youngest daughter, Jolina, a high school senior, plans to attend UCLA. The Bruins and Gators are also competing in the WCWS. Her son, Braylon, is a walk-on backer at Miami, and her other son, Kayden, is in eighth grade.
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After deciding with his assistant coaches which pitchers to use in Friday night’s consolation game against Alabama, Young picked up Lamar and took him to the hotel lobby.
Lamar hadn’t been to a Blue Devils game in person this season until the ACC Tournament earlier this month, and this week he flew for the first time in more than a year while still undergoing treatment to restore circulation. This summer he’s scheduled to undergo reconstructive surgery on both heels, an extremely rare procedure.
When asked what being in Oklahoma City means to his wife, who has supported him throughout the past year, he couldn’t contain his emotions.
“That game meant more than just a game to me and to her,” he said, wiping tears from Young’s face as he sat to his right. “She was the one who always supported me. She got me out of bed. She rolled me in the shower. I can’t tell you how much that game meant to me. Seeing those kids that I coached, it was like my whole life came full circle. I couldn’t have written a better movie script.”
The Blue Devils’ movie script finally came to an end on Friday night in a loss to Alabama, but Lamar was there to see every pitch, to relive that moment with Young.
“Win or lose, we’ve already won,” he said. “I don’t care what the score is. My family won.”
