Loving life: Holly Lovett energizes the Lehigh softball team

Holly Lovett likes to be the loudest player on the softball field. 

She’s been that way since she was a 9-year-old playing on a 10-year-old travel ball team. 

Suited up in center field during a game halfway through the season, Lovett didn’t hesitate to run from the outfield to third base to give her teammate a high-five after making a great play. And when the pitcher struck someone out shortly after, she ran all the way to the pitcher’s circle with a high-five ready again. 

Her father, John Lovett, a former Division I golfer who drove his daughter to every practice and game, witnessed these moments from the stands — familiar with his daughter being the biggest cheerleader for her team.

That energy, he said, is something that transformed Lovett’s travel ball team from a quiet group into a crew where every player was fired up. It persisted through the duration of their season and carried them to the final tournament of the year. 

“At the end of the year (her) coach said, ‘The greatest thing that happened to this team is that Holly is the person that she is,’” John Lovett said. 

It’s carried the third-generation Division I athlete from her hometown of Marlboro, New Jersey, to a spot in the infield for the Lehigh Mountain Hawks where she’s won multiple Patriot League honors and has brought the same energy she had as a child.

“Intrinsically from a young age, I have always been very much team focused (and) team forward: Very energetic, people-oriented, picking people up,” Lovett said.

With four college athletes on her dad’s side of the family, being a good teammate was family-instilled for Lovett, having tried multiple sports as a child. She ended up focusing on the two she loved most: soccer, which she played for 12 years, and softball. 

Lovett said while she loved soccer, something internally always made her gravitate toward the diamond. All she wanted to do was get better. 

By age 10, Lovett was committed to travel ball. A year later, she started thinking about playing in college. 

And by 12 years old, she knew it was her dream. 

Her dad drove her from soccer to softball tournaments around New Jersey. When she committed to a 16U softball team, they had to travel the country for her tournaments. 

The pair once spent 24 days straight on the road, ironically starting at a softball camp at Lehigh before driving to Oklahoma, Colorado and Illinois. 

Begrudgingly agreeing to this cross-country journey at first, Lovett said it eventually turned into one of her favorite memories. 

“Nobody can take those memories away from me, of me and my dad in the car,” she said. “I can tell you that I got a hit off of a Mississippi State pitcher that year and an Alabama pitcher that year, and I got to face a South Carolina pitcher and Notre Dame pitcher. I can tell you details about how I played. But they don’t stick out nearly as much as just driving across the country.” 

As a former athlete himself, her father knew what it took to be successful, especially if it meant lots of traveling. All he wanted for his daughter was to experience it, too.

“Holly was a child that was always asking to get extra work,” her dad said. “I was there to provide the extra work she wanted.” 

For Lovett, that looked like 11 p.m. workouts, 6 a.m. lifts and returning from tournaments at 2 a.m. 

She wanted to do it all. And she wanted to do it by being the hardest working player on the field. 

For her dad, the late nights and long drives were worth it to see his daughter play the sport she loved.

“I always want Holly to know it’s about her,” he said. “It’s nice she’s thankful and appreciative of the help I gave her and the time I spent with her, but at the end of the day, it’s all about her.”

By Lovett’s junior year of high school when recruitment started, she knew she was capable of playing at the DI level. A slow junior year with few offers didn’t deter her from continually emailing coaches or going to recruitment camps. 

In June 2022, she caught the eye of Lehigh coach Fran Troyan, who said he was drawn to her energy, enthusiasm and skill level. 

She committed to Lehigh over Georgetown University in August 2022 because of their historically better softball program and because Lovett wanted to win. 

But a month before college, she broke her arm in her last travel ball tournament, keeping her off the field for her first fall season and admittedly making it harder for her to mesh with the team. 

This took a toll on the first-year’s mental headspace just as much as it took a toll for her physically.

“You want to show to the coaching staff and your team, ‘This is what I am. This is what I got in the tank. This is what I’m going to bring to the team. I’m going to help you win,’” she said. “And, essentially, I just had to start college with nobody knowing who I was as a softball player or as a teammate on the field.”

When she was cleared to play again in November 2023, Lovett had something to prove. 

Working hard to practice with her dad over winter break, she returned in the spring to show her coaches what she could do, particularly on defense. 

During a matchup against UC Santa Barbara over spring break, Lovett recorded five put-outs and capped the game off with a two-run home run. 

She said that game was her turning point. She won Patriot League Rookie of the Week three times and achieved a team-best 14-game hitting streak. She finished with a .300 batting average and 21 runs scored on the season. 

But that success came with pressure. 

Lovett said her sophomore season was almost a statistical anomaly, where she was getting a hit two out of every 10 at bats. She said this didn’t reflect the quality of her at bats and how frequently she was hitting the ball well. 

“Softball was hard (my sophomore year),” she said. “I had some astonishingly bad luck throughout the entire year.” 

Lovett ended her sophomore season batting .200 with eight runs. 

As someone who poured all her time and energy into playing softball, Lovett said it was hard to feel like she was playing well but to still come up short.

She said the season reframed her approach — not just as a player, but as a person. Now, her mind is set on enjoying softball and reigniting her passion for the game. 

Her goals this season are simple: have fun, relax and don’t care about the metrics. 

Troyan said Lovett worked through her sophomore rough patch and kept an optimistic mindset throughout that was seen by the rest of the team. He said positivity, hard work, competitiveness and spirit are her defining qualities. 

“Those words right there really describe Holly, and I think she can easily bring those on a daily basis to the team,” Troyan said. 

This season, she’s dominated defensively, notching a season-high put-outs against Gardner-Webb University on Feb. 13 and accumulated a .960 fielding percentage on the season. At the plate, she batted .302 with four home runs. 

In the moments where Lovett’s playing her best, she’s not focusing on individual mechanics. She’s thinking about how to be the best teammate. 

“I’m just going up there, and it’s like muscle memory — cheering people on, having a good time, laughing,” she said. “That’s really the type of player I am.”

To maintain that mindset, Lovett said she relies on three core support systems: her parents, her best friends and her boyfriend. 

One of those friends is junior Hannah Letzer, a player on Lehigh’s women’s tennis team who met Lovett their first year in a student-athlete mentor group. 

Letzer said she and Lovett experienced similar highs and lows as athletes throughout their first-year and sophomore seasons. Despite the differences in their sports, she said they constantly check in on one another and help each other through rough patches if the pressure becomes overwhelming.

If Letzer’s feeling down, she said Lovett is the type of person that will drop everything to come to her house just to give her a hug and that she lights up every room she enters. 

“Her energy is always at 110% even if you’re at like a 30%,” Letzer said. “Holly just being Holly made it easy to connect and build that friendship.” 

That energy isn’t something Lovett plans to lose any time soon. Rather, she spins it into two things.

The first is hard work. The ability, she said, to feed the fire inside that fuels her competitiveness. The second is positivity — the same joy that led her 9-year-old self to feed the fires of the teammates around her. 

“Everything feels really heavy in the moment,” she said, “but the best you can do is just take a step back and be like, ‘You know what? It doesn’t matter as much as I’m making it feel. I’m gonna be fine tomorrow. I’ll wake up, and the sun is still going to rise tomorrow.’”