Nicholls’ Lewis fireman of a different sort as coach of Lady Colonels softball team

In some ways, Justin Lewis is still a fireman.

In baseball slang, a “fireman” is a relief pitcher – the guy called upon to put out any late fires and save the game for his team. As a player, first at Central Arizona College and then at Louisiana-Monroe (then called Northeast Louisiana), Lewis was not a relief pitcher, but an outfielder. Still, he knew the importance of a fireman.

Between stints playing and coaching, Lewis became an actual fireman. His near decade as a firefighter, Lewis said, has helped him in his current gig as the head softball coach at Nicholls.

“It’s like anything else – the fire service, coaching, it’s all problem solving, and being a trained problem solver, I think really helps in coaching,” said Lewis, who is heading into his third year as Lady Colonels coach. “Like you pull up to a fire scene and you have to assess the situation – which play you’re going to put on because we (as firefighters) have plays. Whether it was an attic fire or a garage fire, they’re all different and so you had to be able to assess it quickly, determine what you’re going to do, and then have you and your crew take action.

“So that’s no different than the problems we face on a daily basis with coaching, whether it’s dealing with player issues and their personal issues that they come in to us with, or being out on the field and seeing what needs to happen and what play could potentially we could put on and assess anything that’s going to work and then having practiced it enough that the girls know, just like in the fire service, you have to go and train and make sure we know exactly what we’re doing and be able to run it efficiently at the drop of a hat. So those kinds of things are very interchangeable.”

His journey from baseball to softball also proved to be interchangeable.

After playing baseball at Canyon del Oro High School in Tucson, Ari. – which is known as a hotbed for baseball and softball – Lewis tried out for a junior college team.

“I was kind of a knucklehead and didn’t get good grades, so junior college was my only option,” Lewis laughed, as he recalled his younger self. “It was like a walk-on tryout, and they cut me in two days.”

That sent Lewis into the “real world” for the first time.

“I took that whole year off and just worked at a car wash, a car dealership detailing cars for a whole year and was kind of really like, you know, you get that hard-core labor job and you’re like, ‘is this really what I’m going to do the rest of my life?’ I just knew that I could play and wanted an opportunity,” Lewis remembered.

That opportunity came at Central Arizona and then Northeast Louisiana. In both instances he had to make the squad as a walk-on before quickly earning a scholarship and becoming a star outfielder.

“I graduated (from NLU) and then joined the coaching staff at Central Arizona College in the spring of 2000 and was there for three years,” Lewis said.

Wages can be meager for an assistant at a junior college, so Lewis left for the private sector.

“I think the first job, I sold mortgages. I went into the sales world,” Lewis said.

In 2008, he joined the fire department. It was also about that time that Lewis began playing fastpitch softball.

Meanwhile, he faced his first fire of a different sort rather quickly.

“My daughter was born the night that I graduated the fire academy,” Lewis recalled. “My wife said, ‘I’m having contractions.’ We had contractions for two months with the last (child). The second one goes a lot quicker, apparently.

“I get home at 2:00 in the morning and then 30 minutes later, (his wife) is tapping me on the forehead that her water broke. So not an ideal setup, but we made it work and then I started on the job 48 hours later.”

The fire department gave Lewis a feeling akin to being part of a locker room atmosphere.

“The fire department was great. It’s full of ex-athletes. You get over playing the game, but you missed the camaraderie and the locker room, and that’s what the fire service is,” said Lewis. “You know you’re living with these people 24 hours a day for ten days a month. You eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. You work out, you play basketball, you watch movies. It’s a pretty cool job.

“If I didn’t come back to coaching, I’d obviously still be there, and a lot of really good people were there.”

It was at the suggestion of his wife, Amy, that Lewis began to think about a return to coaching.

“About year seven (in the fire department), I was stationed in a retirement community and just chasing snakes all summer, scraping up naked old men off the toilet and was like ‘this isn’t what I thought I was signing up for.’ I had this saying that if I could do it all over again, I would never have got out of coaching. I used to say it all the time.

“Finally, my wife heard me say it for the 10 millionth time. I was on the phone. When I hung up, she says, ‘do you think you can get back in?’ I said, ‘what are you talking about?’

‘Back into coaching,” she clarified.

What was Lewis’ reaction to his wife?

“Well, I’m halfway through a public safety retirement. You’re halfway through a teaching retirement,” Lewis said. “On paper, that’s not the move.

“She said, ‘I know you’re not going to be completely happy until you’re doing what you’re meant to do.’ So, I started a three-year process of trying to get back into coaching.”

Finding a coaching job proved difficult since Lewis had been away from coaching for a decade.

“So, for three years I applied for everything and finally I got an opportunity with a guy named Craig Nicholson. He was the head softball coach at Central Arizona at the time. We had known each other, and he went to a D-II school in Texas called Texas A&M-Kingsville. He gave me an opportunity. I was there for two years. I was living in Corpus Christi and driving down to Kingsville about 40 minutes,” Lewis said.

Another acquaintance offered another opportunity.

“Then my friend, Kristen Zaleski, got the head job at A&M-Corpus Christi and asked me if I’d go there with her. So, it got me into Division-I. I was already living in Corpus Christi. I just had to change the direction of where I went,” said Lewis.

When he was searching for a job, Lewis worked the camps of University of Arizona coach Mike Candrea. While Lewis was at A&M-Corpus Christi, Candrea informed him of an opening for the hitting coach at Fresno State.

It was an opportunity Lewis said he couldn’t pass up. He took the position and a year later, he gained his first head coaching job at Nicholls in 2022.

Inheriting a team that had gone 12-28, including 5-22 in the Southland Conference, Lewis immediately had some fires to deal with.

“A lot of their talent graduated or transferred out,” Lewis recalled. “They had a true freshman (Ashlyn Reavis) that led the conference in hitting and she transferred before I got here, so we had no idea who was going to play shortstop.”

“There were just so many questions,” he continued. “We just weren’t deep. I think we had two players that had any kind of real playing time. It was a very young team. We weren’t deep and then one of our pitchers got hurt. We weren’t deep in the (pitching) circle anyways. One of our pitchers tore an ACL in the fall and never played, so we were having pitcher tryouts.”

The pitcher to emerge was Kennedy Hebert.

“God bless her. She hadn’t pitched since high school and was willing to give it a shot. I made her start against Alabama that year. That was a challenge,” said Lewis.

After just managing to field a team that led to another season with only 12 wins his first year, the next fire came with Lewis trying to improve the talent level at Nicholls.

“We brought in 17 new players, 13 freshmen,” Lewis explained. “It was like herding cats around here most of the year. We started five to six freshmen every game, two sophomores, one junior and one COVID senior.

“Melise Gossen was our lone senior – and a COVID senior at that. She was the perfect mother hen to help guide all these youngsters that we had. We were just super grateful that she came back and helped us out with that. We just went out and got a bunch of talented kids and coached them. Last year was really about learning how to win for a lot of these youngsters. We had nobody on our team – even Melise and Alexa (Poche), was a junior – they’d never played in any games that mattered.”

The young Lady Colonels started to improve as the season progressed.

“The series against (Houston Christian),” Lewis remembered, ‘we had to sweep that series in order to lock up third place by ourselves. They did that, and from where we started the year to where we finished, getting to win a couple games in the conference tournament…

It was a far cry from the way the season began.

“Young Molly Yoo, from where she started her season – (it) wasn’t a great performance on opening night here against New Mexico – big stage, a lot of people here (and the game broadcast) on ESPN-plus to where she ended in the conference tournament, outdueling the Pitcher of the Year in the conference and over eight innings – that growth was just epitomized the entire season.”

The Lady Colonels finished 29-24 overall, including 13-11 in the SLC.

Will there be fires to put out heading into Year 3 under Lewis?

“One, we can’t sneak up on anybody. Two, there’s lots and lots of competition, so we’re going to have to navigate that,” the Nicholls coach said. “It’s one of the things we train on and teach and help them navigate is how to have healthy competition and that it’s not a ‘you versus me and I’m going to hate the person and deep down hope for them to do bad so I get more opportunity,’ but we teach them that they need each other to be the best versions of themselves that they can be.”

“Those are the biggest things I think we’re gonna deal with. Just besides all the challenges that we know we deal with here at Nicholls anyways with the lack of resources,” Lewis concluded. “Doing more with less is what we do and there’s all kinds of challenges and fires that come with that as well.”