Reardon Reflects on 40 Years and 1,000 Wins

By Alysha Galla

For 40 years, Coach Pat Reardon ’90 has been an Eagle. First as a student-athlete for the men’s soccer and baseball teams, next as a soccer graduate assistant, and finally a head coach of multiple sports. He’s built up a legacy over four decades that will make him a Central legend, especially now that he’s reached a milestone few others have achieved – 1,000 wins as an NAIA softball coach.

Reardon’s tenure as the head softball coach began in 1993. After graduating, he stayed in Fayette, “just trying to kill time” until his thenfiancé, Leslie Peters ’91, graduated. He coached everything from women’s soccer to tennis to cross country, and when the softball head coaching job came open in the fall of 1992, he went to the athletic director and pitched the idea of trading his tennis duties for softball.

“He had a meeting with the president playing racquetball that day,” he said, “and about three hours later, I was named the new head softball coach.”

Thirty-three years later, Coach Reardon celebrated his 1,000th win with a 5-2 victory at Williams Baptist University on March 12, 2025. With his seventh 40-plus win season in the last nine years, he now holds a 1,028-581-1 overall record following the 2025 season. That’s an average of 31 Eagle wins per season.

“Central Methodist has always been a special place,” Coach Reardon said when asked what’s kept him in Fayette for this long. “It does come down to the people. The people, in one word, would be the reason why.”

Reardon’s family is all in with his coaching at Central Methodist as well. His daughter, Addy ’19, went to CMU and helped him coach, his son, Avery, helps in the off-season, and Leslie is one of the team’s biggest cheerleaders while sacrificing so much being a coach’s wife. It does not stop with just his immediate family, though. His dad, Gene, has spent the last 19 years next to him in the dugout as the associate head coach, and his mom is the team’s seamstress and another big cheerleader for the team.

He went on to say, “This is my program. This is my stamp that’s on this.”

The softball program continues to thrive under Reardon. He has taken the Eagles to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) World Series five times during his tenure, including appearances in last three years. The 13-time Heart Conference Coach of the Year is the third-winningest coach in NAIA history and holds the conference record for coaching wins.

Under the 2012 CMU Hairston Hall of Fame inductee, the program has seen 27 NAIA AllAmericans, 16 National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA) All-Americans, 134 Heart All-Conference players, and mor than 175 NAIA-Daktronics Scholar-Athletes.

It hasn’t always been that way for Reardon, though. Through his first 16 years of coaching, there was not a conference championship. In 2008, that changed, and since the 2008 conference championship, winning became the expectation. Now, the Eagles have had 10 conference championships. He credits a lot of this success to his dad joining the staff in 2006. Whether Gene’s presence breathed fresh life into the program or his recruiting prowess was the reason, the Eagles became a better program.

Even better than the success he has achieved on the diamond? The relationships he has built over the years, the players that have reached out and said it was the best four years of their life, and the success he has seen his players move on to, Reardon says.

When asked if he had anything to say to all his student-athletes he has coached, he said, “The biggest thing would be that I appreciate everything they’ve done when they were here, through the good and the bad. Whether they thought I was a great coach or a terrible coach, whatever the case is. They are all a piece of this program whether they were reserve or varsity. We celebrate the varsity, but there are a lot of reserve players that have come through here that practiced with us or were big pieces of this program that don’t necessarily get the glory and everything else.

But everyone that stepped foot through this door, I try to make sure I treat as an equal.

“I tried to do the best for each one of them,” Reardon said. “I’m sure proud of all they have accomplished in life.”