Sinicki's Leadership Has Been Golden For Ducks

Hundreds of times over the past four years, Paige Sinicki has pulled up to Jane Sanders Stadium for practices and games with the Oregon softball team.

Never in those four years has The Jane looked quite as beautiful as it has this week. Signage is going up around the stadium, decals are being applied to exterior windows, all indicating the same thing: This week, for the first time in Sinicki's career, the UO softball team will host an NCAA Regional.

Green and yellow are the preferred colors around these parts. But this week, the blue hue of the NCAA logo is a welcome sight.

"It's starting to feel real," Sinicki said Tuesday following practice with the Ducks. "And we're getting really excited."

Two weeks after celebrating her senior day and a Big Ten regular-season title at The Jane, Sinicki will be back on her home field for at least one more weekend. As the No. 16 overall seed into the NCAA championship tournament, Oregon will host a four-team regional this week, with Stanford and Binghamton meeting to open the Eugene Regional on Friday at 2 p.m. and the Ducks hosting Weber State at 4:30 p.m.

Oregon is making its fifth straight NCAA Regional appearance, but will host postseason play for the first time since 2018. A year after having to face perennial power Oklahoma on the road in regionals, Sinicki and the Ducks get to open the tournament at home this spring.

"I remember leaving Oklahoma and being like, there's no way that I'm going to leave college without ever hosting a regional and going as far as we can," Sinicki said. "So that's kind of how we left last year. All the work that we put in this summer and then coming back with a group that just had so much passion, but also so much talent, it was like the greatest combination to put together."

Paige Sinicki

Sinicki has been a mainstay on the Oregon infield for four years now, including as a sophomore on the 2023 team that reached Super Regionals. She has started 202 games in her UO career, including the last 183 consecutively, bringing gap-to-gap production to the lineup, Gold Glove defense to the infield and critical leadership to a roster that relies heavily on underclassmen.

"I don't think we are doing the things we're doing if we don't have our leadership," UO coach Melyssa Lombardi said. "When I think of Paige and think of Kai (Luschar) and the stuff that they're doing on and off the field, the tough conversations — nobody likes to have a tough conversations, but what I love is that when you do have the tough conversation, solutions always come. … The leadership that our group, what they've done throughout the year, the result is what you're seeing on the field with our team."

Sinicki enters this stage of the postseason hitting .371 for the Ducks, having been named first-team all-Big Ten. She also made the conference's all-defensive team, a year after winning the UO softball program's first NFCA Rawlings Gold Glove.

Years from now when fans at The Jane reminisce about Sinicki's contributions for the Ducks, it's likely the first memories conjured will be her ability to make spectacular plays at shortstop, and to make the difficult look routine.

"Growing up my favorite athlete was Derek Jeter, and I can remember all the plays that I watched him make," Sinicki said. "Watching a lot growing up, I think that allowed me to just understand the game a little bit more. I feel like it gave me a competitive advantage, just because I had a better softball and baseball IQ than most people growing up."

The Oregon Ducks take on the Ohio State Buckeyes at Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Oregon on October 12, 2024 (Copyright Evan Poulsen/Go Ducks)

The Oregon Ducks take on the Ohio State Buckeyes at Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Oregon on October 12, 2024 (Copyright Evan Poulsen/Go Ducks)

One of Sinicki's most valuable attributes is her willingness to seek out mentors. She went from watching and learning from Jeter to being coached by legendary UO shortstop Nikki (Udria) Ragin at Oregon, while playing alongside and learning from second baseman Allee Bunker.

For the last two years, two-time NCAA champion Sydney Romero has helped elevate Sinicki's game even further, culminating in the Gold Glove last season.

"Paige has really good feet, really good glove work — she's a Gold Glover for a reason," Romero said. "So for her, it was more of just continuing to enhance on what she was already good at. There wasn't anything necessarily for her to change, but it was more of just, let's enhance and let's continue to get better. And she did that, and she still is."

Sinicki said she's benefitted most from Romero's tutelage on the mental side of the game. Naturally a perfectionist, Sinicki has had to learn, in the rare instances when she doesn't make a play, not to let it affect her going forward.

"Coach Ro's really just helped me not be so hard on myself, and realize that there's so much more game left and more pitches left in the game that I need to just focus on those," Sinicki said. "Because there's gonna be another opportunity where I get that play done — and it could be the game-winning catch, or something like that. So when I can focus on that, instead of being so hard on myself for something I messed up, that's kind of what the big difference was."

Paige Sinicki and Remmington Hewitt

Mistakes have been few and far between for Sinicki this season. She has just five errors all year, and is fielding .967 to raise her career average to .965.

"She's a wall," her fellow senior and roommate Kedre Luschar said. "She knows that nothing is getting by her, and she's just awesome. She's so athletic, and she trusts herself, and she just puts in so much hard work so that all shows up."

That work ethic from Sinicki has been absorbed by the infielders around her. She's had to help usher in a new group this spring, with sophomore Katie Flannery at third base and a pair of freshmen — Kaylynn Jones and Rylee McCoy — on the right side. The results? Oregon is third in the NCAA in fielding percentage at .982, and 10th in ERA at 2.27.

Sinicki is endlessly grateful for the mentorship she received from Bunker as an underclassmen. So she's only too happy to pay it forward with the young new infielders.

"When you're a senior, like, what do you want your legacy to be when you leave?" Sinicki said. "And I think with this team, it's just really teaching these young ones how to bring a culture every day that's, like, a championship way. And I think that's something that I'll find a lot of peace in and joy in years to come, just to know that this group was able to do that for the young ones."