by Malcolm Butler
When Morgan Turkoly was in high school, she played for a travel ball coach named Tracy Beard in the Texas Glory organization.
Beard, who passed away from ALS during Turkoly’s college career at Tech, always told his players something to live by.
It was honest and straightforward.
“He used to tell me, ‘Leave it better than you found it,'” said Turkoly, who will be enshrined into the Louisiana Tech Athletics Hall of Fame on Oct. 9. “I think it took me getting to college to truly understand and appreciate what he meant.”
To say Turkoly accomplished that feat during her four years (2016-19) at Louisiana Tech is pretty honest and straightforward.
Four straight winning seasons.
Three Conference USA championships.
Two NCAA Regional appearances.
One All-American honor.
149 wins.
“Morgan was the epitome of doing just that,” said former LA Tech head coach Mark Montgomery, who started recruiting Turkoly when he was at Northern Colorado and she was a 5-foot-nothing slapper in eighth grade.
“She was somebody who came in, never assumed, never had the entitlement piece. She was the hardest worker, but I think whenever your best players are also your best leaders, that’s when you’ve got something special.”
Special. As in Hall of Fame special.
Long before Turkoly’s name became etched throughout the Louisiana Tech softball record book, Montgomery saw something in the undersized kid from Sanger, Texas.
Some intangibles that couldn’t be measured with a tape measure.
“What I loved about her was her speed and her energy,” Montgomery said. “You could just spot it. The kid wasn’t just a little 5-foot-nothing slapper. She was hitting away. She just had tons of energy and effort. We just recognized kind of the intangibles of her. She already played much more athletic than her size would have indicated.”
Montgomery continued recruiting Turkoly after taking the Louisiana Tech job prior to the 2013 season.
And then Turkoly grew. And grew. And continued to grow.
By the time she finished high school, the 5-foot slapper Montgomery had started recruiting had become a 5-foot-8 athlete capable of hitting for power.
Not surprisingly, some programs that hadn’t given her much attention earlier suddenly became interested.
Turkoly noticed. And that mattered.
“He wanted me as a 5-foot slapper, and he wanted me as a 5-8 power hitter,” Turkoly said. “I had multiple schools reach out after I grew and became taller and probably stronger and faster and didn’t even know I was the same person, but didn’t give me the time of day because I was smaller.
“Coach Montgomery never treated me like that. He wanted me from the first day.”
Montgomery also never pressured Turkoly to make the kind of early commitment that had become common in college softball recruiting at the time. He continued to recruit her and allowed the process to play itself out.
When Turkoly eventually visited Ruston, something else clicked. Louisiana Tech felt like another home away from home. So she chose the Bulldogs.
It turned out to be a pretty good decision for both sides.
Turkoly made an immediate impact as a freshman in 2016, hitting 10 home runs and quickly showing Montgomery that the player he had first identified years earlier had developed into something even more special.
“Morgan only got better,” Montgomery said. “Her bat control became through the roof. So now we could bunt, we could slap, we could hit, we could hit for power. She could steal bases.
“She was literally as close to probably a five-tool player that Louisiana Tech was ever going to get.”
Montgomery said Turkoly’s arm strength was the only tool that wasn’t elite.
“Her other four tools were plus-plus,” he said. “They weren’t just good. They were great. That kid really brought everything you would ever want out of a player to the table.”
The success and subsequent accolades followed.
Turkoly became the only player in Louisiana Tech softball history to earn all-conference honors in all four seasons of her career. She was named the 2018 Conference USA Player of the Year.
She was also named a 2019 Senior CLASS Award First-Team All-American, an honor recognizing achievement in competition as well as the classroom, character and community.
Her name is etched throughout the Louisiana Tech softball record book, ranking among the program’s career leaders in virtually every major offensive category. But when Turkoly looks back on those four years, the numbers aren’t what she talks about first.
It’s the people.
It’s the teammates.
And it’s what they built together.
After breakout freshman and sophomore seasons, Turkoly certainly had opportunities to wonder what might be available elsewhere as other P4 programs tried to backdoor their way into getting her to transfer.
She didn’t.
“We had built something special at Tech,” Turkoly said.
She wanted to see how far they could take it.
There was also a part of Turkoly that enjoyed doing it at Louisiana Tech, a program that didn’t receive the same national attention as some of the schools that had overlooked her earlier.
She relished opportunities to play those programs.
“I wanted to get to the next level with my current team and with a mid-major and prove a bunch of people wrong. … I loved playing big games and I loved playing against big schools because I liked to prove to them that, like, you missed out and we can beat you.”
Turkoly’s impact spread well beyond her on-the-field talent.
She became a leader.
“Morgan from day one was the perfect freshman leader because she took care of her own business at the highest level,” he said. “She was always leading by example, even when you didn’t ask her to lead other people.”
As Turkoly matured, so did her leadership.
By her junior and senior seasons, she had learned how to use her voice and hold herself and her teammates accountable as part of her role as a team captain.
She admits she wasn’t always the loudest leader, but according to Montgomery she didn’t need to be.
“Jazlyn (Crowder) may have been the one that scared you,” Montgomery said, referring to Turkoly’s teammate and fellow captain Jazlyn Crowder. “But Morgan was the one that inspired you to do well.
“I literally think all of our players on the team were like, ‘I want to be like Morgan.'”
Perhaps no moment better illustrated the type of teammate Turkoly had become than one that didn’t involve her winning an award.
Turkoly was the reigning Conference USA Player of the Year entering her senior season in 2019. By the end of that regular season, both Turkoly and Crowder had put together Player of the Year-worthy performances.
The coaching staff agonized over the decision, even discussing whether to nominate both before deciding the possibility of splitting the vote was too risky.
They nominated Crowder. She won.
And when the award was announced to the team, Montgomery remembers exactly who was happiest for her.
Morgan Turkoly.
“Absolutely,” Montgomery said. “I remember it well. I remember that exactly like it was yesterday. It brought tears to both of our eyes seeing that.”
There was an ironic footnote to the voting.
Despite not being Louisiana Tech’s nominee, Turkoly finished third in the Player of the Year voting that season as league coaches wrote her name in on their ballot, a testament to the respect she had earned from opposing coaches around Conference USA.
The final weeks of Turkoly’s career provided another test of everything she and her teammates had built.
In the early morning hours of April 25, 2019, an EF3 tornado ripped through Ruston and destroyed the Louisiana Tech softball complex.
Turkoly remembers arriving that morning and seeing a hole ripped through the scoreboard, the outfield fence gone, turf torn apart, trees down and power lines scattered around what had been their home.
There would be no more games there.
The Bulldogs had also hit a difficult stretch on the field, losing three of four prior to the storm. In some ways softball didn’t seem quite as important, yet in others it became more important than ever.
The players were given the option of whether they wanted to continue playing.
There was little doubt about the answer.
The tornado, Montgomery believes, galvanized his team.
Louisiana Tech swept Western Kentucky during a relocated Senior Weekend at ULM and carried that momentum to the program’s first Conference USA regular season title and ultimately into the Conference USA Tournament a few weeks later in Birmingham, Alabama.
Turkoly remembers that final conference tournament with one word.
“Perfect.”
The Bulldogs rolled through the field, winning the tournament championship and earning an NCAA Regional berth.
For Turkoly, it was the perfect ending to four years that she now describes as some of the best of her life.
“I remember my senior year going into some of those final games,” said Turkoly. “I didn’t continue my playing career after college, so it just made it really emotional. I think I was the most vocal I’d ever been in those last five games just because I knew it was the last time I would ever lace up my cleats.”
Years later, she wishes she could give the freshman version of herself one piece of advice.
“Don’t take any of it for granted,” she said. “Live in the moment. Enjoy every single moment, the good and the bad, because you get better from all of the circumstances. But really just live in the moment because it goes by so fast.”
Now, as Turkoly prepares to take her place among the greatest athletes in Louisiana Tech history, the records, championships and honors provide plenty of evidence of why she belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Montgomery believes her impact went much deeper.
“Specifically Morgan, your best player was one of your best leaders,” said Montgomery.
Ask Turkoly what she hopes people remember about her Louisiana Tech career and she doesn’t start with an All-America honor, a Player of the Year award, a record or a championship.
She goes back to Tracy Beard.
“I hope that I left it better than I found it,” Turkoly said. “I hope that I was a really great teammate and leader and someone that was humble and always was able to help others when needed.
“Really, that’s all I hope. I hope I was a great leader because a lot of the memories that I have are with my team. Not really specific at-bats or plays in the field. It was with the group of girls I was with.”
Leave it better than you found it.
Mission accomplished, Morgan Turkoly.
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