The Breeze
JMU’s award-winning newspaper since 1922
APRIL 28, 2022 VOL. 100 NO.28 BREEZEJMU.ORG
IN REMEMBRANCE
JMU softball’s Lauren Bernett passed away Monday. The JMU community and universities nationwide have shown an outpouring of support for the team and all who knew her. Matt Young / The Breeze
By SAVANNAH REGER, MADISON HRICIK & GRANT JOHNSON The Breeze
How fitting that an ambulance drove down South High Street as the JMU athletic community left the flower dropping memorial for JMU softball’s Lauren Bernett. She once laughed when the sirens flew by Veterans Memorial Park after practice. “This is fun,” Lauren said at JMU softball’s media day Feb. 16, giggling as an ambulance interrupted an interview with The Breeze. Giggling, happy, smiling: It’s how everyone describes Lauren, who died on Monday. She was a sophomore on the Dukes’ softball team and served as catcher in the Women’s College World Series (WCWS) just under a year ago. Lauren grew up in McDonald, Pennsylvania, and graduated from South Fayette High School. She was a biology major with a preveterinary medicine minor and had four siblings. She was the only freshman consistently in both the batting order and on the field for the WCWS. Lauren hit a home run against
Liberty in the Knoxville Regional Final, arguably sealing the game for the Dukes and sending them to the Super Regional round of the tournament. Her last home run at home clinched the game against Hofstra on April 10. In all those moments, Lauren smiled. She opened her mouth wide as she ran to her team at home plate. This season, she put on a sparkly purple hat when she scored and ran around with it during postgame — the smile never leaving her face. Lauren was like this all through her life as a softball player, according to Richele Hall, her coach at South Fayette High School in McDonald, Pennsylvania, and during travel softball before that. Just five days after JMU’s run in the WCWS, Lauren was back in her hometown, helping Hall coach her team at a tournament. This is what Hall will remember Lauren for, she said, no matter how good she was on the field. As Hall put it, Lauren was “a one-of-a-kind type of kid.” “There was just so many kids that looked up to her,” Hall said between sniffles and with a broken voice in a phone call with The Breeze on April 26. “She was just, like,
a once-in-a-lifetime kid to be able to coach and know, and my heart, my heart is broken.” Hall pointed to softball nationals during the summer of 2017 or 2018 when she said Lauren played catcher for five games over a weekend in 100-degree heat in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Hall’s team lost in the finals by one run, but it was Lauren who Hall said still stood out. Hall said there was no complaining, no saying she was tired at any point — “there’s just not a lot of kids like her,” she said. “That’s probably one of my best memories of her as a player,” Hall said, “not like a hit, not like — it’s just, like, her will and her grit to just always want to give her teammates everything and be the best, and I think that that moment just kind of portrayed that for me.” Lauren attended Hall’s wedding. Hall’s memories of Lauren, she said, were all happy — until April 26. “I just can’t believe you have to talk about her in the past tense,” Hall said. Later on April 26, the day after Lauren’s death, Hall said about six of her former teammates from Pennsylvania were meeting “because they don’t want to be alone.”
“I don’t think that I will ever meet anybody like her ever again in my life,” Hall said. She choked up as she said it, as she did the whole time she talked about Lauren. “I’m just thankful that, I mean, I had the time that I had with her. I just never thought when I saw her last month playing that would be the last time that I would get to hug her and see her in person again.” Lauren’s high school teammates took to Twitter to talk about her as a friend and person. Towson softball’s Emma Armstrong, who played with Lauren on Team Pennsylvania Fastpitch’s 18 years old and under team, a travel softball team, wrote, “Thanks for making me a better person on and off the field and for always being the life of the party … No one could make me laugh the way you did.” Lauren made people laugh. Her laughter was contagious, on her high school team and at JMU. Perhaps the one who laughed the most with her at college is sophomore pitcher Alissa Humphrey. see LAUREN BERNETT, page 4