Coach Mike Candrea takes a moment to gather his thoughts during Tuesday’s news conference in McKale Center. The longtime UA softball coach is retiring following 36 seasons.

 Mamta Popat, Arizona Daily Star

Mike Candrea and his wife, Tina, attended the Sunday morning mass at St.Thomas the Apostle Parish in mid-December 2011, hopeful he would see Mary Roby, the woman who hired him to be Arizona’s softball coach in 1985.

Roby, 85, was dying of breast and brain cancer. She would not readily talk about the severity of her condition, but Candrea feared he might never see her again. They embraced in the foyer of the chapel. Both began to cry.

Their relationship had flourished for a quarter-century.

In the summer of 1985, Roby’s first reaction was not to hire Candrea, then the NJCAA championship softball coach at Central Arizona College. Roby, the senior women’s administrator in the UA athletic department, was dismayed that Candrea is an ASU alumnus, but she also knew that Candrea sometimes chewed tobacco during CAC games.

Mike Candrea talked with the Star about why now is the right time for him to retire, the culture of Arizona softball and Tucson's impact

β€œMary stood her ground on those two issues β€” the tobacco and the ASU thing,’’ former Arizona athletic director Cedric Dempsey said Monday. β€œSo (assistant AD) Rocky LaRose and I worked pretty hard at changing her mind. We had no doubt Mike would be successful. Finally, Mary saw all the good things Mike had to offer. We got the right man.’’

The right man: after Roby retired in 1989, Candrea won eight national championships from 1991-2007. Candrea appreciated her so much that in 1997 he staged β€œMary Roby Night” at Hillenbrand Stadium, a game played before a capacity crowd of 2,600.

By February 2012, Roby was moved into Peppi’s House hospice on the TMC campus. Although final preparations were underway for the season-opening tournament at Hillenbrand Stadium, Candrea drove to see Roby at Peppi’s House. She died later that evening.

Four days later, Candrea and his wife again entered St. Thomas the Apostle church, this time for Roby’s funeral. He was to be a pallbearer. When the service was complete, Candea moved toward the casket and helped to carry the body of Mary Roby outside to a waiting hearse.

I was standing next to Candrea as he bent over and kissed the casket. β€œI’ll see you again someday, Mary,” he said.

University of Arizona softball coach Mike Candrea during practice in 1988.

β€˜He could help any coach’

When Candrea was hired by Arizona, he was as much of an outsider as a college softball coach could be. There were no male softball coaches in the Pac-10, and there wouldn’t be another until Oregon State hired Kirk Walker in 1995.

β€œIt was very rare,” remembers Gail Gault, a Sahuaro High School grad who was one of Arizona’s leading softball players of the 1970s. Gault had been an assistant coach on the UA’s 1985 softball team, aiding Paula Noel. All five of Arizona’s previous softball coaches were women β€” including LaRose, who was the team’s interim coach in 1980.

One of Candrea’s first decisions was to ask Gault to be on his 1986 coaching staff. It was probably an awakening for both.

β€œOh yeah, oh yeah, we knew who Mike was, we’d heard about his championship teams at Central Arizona,” says Gault. β€œBut we didn’t know what to expect.”

Gault spent the β€˜86 season in what was a seminar on coaching as much as a day-to-day process to rebuild a Wildcat program that had not recently been successful. She then left softball and became a prominent Tucson educator.

β€œI had never known anyone who knew so much about softball, about hitting, about the game,” says Gault, a retired middle school teacher who has been a regular at Hillenbrand Stadium for 30 years. β€œHe could help any coach. There was no bull; his message was that he was building a family, and an atmosphere of togetherness. I learned so much.

β€œWe’re still good friends. I worked at his camps. Every time I see him, he stops to talk to me.”

Mike Candrea trots onto the field with his Wildcats for fielding drills before a game against South Dakota at Hillenbrand Stadium in 2018.

β€˜A legacy of togetherness’

After five seasons at Arizona, breaking into the Women’s College World Series three times, Candrea didn’t back off the prospect of building the NCAA’s first stand-alone softball compound. Progress was slow.

In May 1990, the UA and City of Tucson reached a tentative agreement to build a softball facility at Reid Park, behind Hi Corbett Field. The initial project would not include lights or permanent bleachers.

But to continue at Gittings Field, which was essentially the UA’s physical education plant β€” scheduling practices around P.E. classes β€” wasn’t going to work.

That’s about the time former UA associate athletic director Tom Sanders introduced Candrea to Bill and Doby Hillenbrand, Indiana natives who had moved to Tucson in 1981 and became significant donors to the UA athletic department.

An entrepreneur who made a fortune in the midwest’s Batesville Casket Company, among other things, Hillenbrand met Candrea for lunch. The conversation soon turned to a possible softball stadium for the Wildcats.

β€œWhile Bill and Mike were at lunch,” Doby Hillenbrand said Tuesday before attending Candrea’s retirement ceremony at McKale Center, β€œBill asked what Mike had in mind. So Mike got out a pen and wrote it on a napkin. The next thing you know, Bill said, β€˜I’ll do this.’”

In 1993, Hillenbrand Stadium opened. It was β€” no contest β€” the top facility in college softball. Candrea became the most well-known softball coach in the country and took advantage of it, leading the Wildcats to seven national championships the next 14 years.

β€œI appreciate how far Mike has grown the game,” Doby Hillenbrand says. β€œDo you know he used to mow the grass himself when they played at (Gittings Field)? That’s how low-budget the program was.

β€œBut what impresses me the most is how he has changed the lives of so many of those young women. He has left a legacy of togetherness.”

And it’s not like Candrea moved on and has forgotten Bill Hillenbrand, who died in 2003.

β€œMike always calls me on my birthday; he’s never missed,” Doby says. β€œHe calls me to wish me Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas. He’s just a humble, down-to-earth guy.”

Mike Candrea tracks the game from his perch at the end of the Wildcats' bench during the UA's 2019 WCWS game against Washington.

The greatest

After Dempsey left Arizona to become executive director of the NCAA, Candrea hit the prime of his career. In successive years, from 1994-1998, the Wildcats went 64-3, 66-6, 58-9, 61-5 and 67-4. That’s a streak that is likely never to be broken anywhere by any team.

One day, serving on the board of the Arizona Foundation, Karl Eller, founder of the UA Eller College of Business and one of the most successful businessmen in American history, asked Dempsey, fellow board member, to name the best coach he ever hired.

β€œEveryone expected me to say Lute Olson,” Dempsey says now. β€œBut I told Karl it was Mike Candrea.

β€œHe was like, β€˜What? He is?”

It took a while even for a UA alumnus like Karl Eller to understand what Candrea has accomplished and what he has meant to Tucson and to college softball.

Candrea didn’t have the national platform of Olson, but he sustained his success for more than 30 years. The master builder of college softball, Candrea directly or indirectly has touched every coach in Division I college softball. Now, after a final burst to the Women’s College World Series, he has gotten Lute-like attention nationally.

When Jim Livengood left as Arizona’s athletic director in 2010, Candrea expressed interest in becoming the school’s AD. He asked Dempsey for advice.

β€œI told him, β€˜Mike, you’re sitting on top of the world,’” Dempsey remembers. β€œWe talked about how much respect his former players have for him, and how walking away from softball might not be his best move at that time.

β€œI think that’s when he began to see the significance of what he has accomplished.”

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Contact sports columnist Greg Hansen at 520-573-4362 or ghansen@tucson.com. On Twitter: @ghansen711