Dunlap’s Fairchild wins 2026 Clutch Sports Media Softball Coach of the Year

The sport of softball has taken Germaine Fairchild to many different places. 

It took her to a multitude of fields across the country as a standout player in college, the heights of playing softball professionally and in several dugouts as a collegiate coach. In turn, she helped take the Dunlap softball team to place few get to experience as players: the IHSA State Finals. 

Fairchild is Clutch Sports Media’s 2026 Softball Coach of the Year after leading the Eagles to a fourth place finish in Class 3A, which matches the best finish in the program’s history. Her team’s accomplishments also included reaching a 30-win season, winning a highly-competitive Mid-Illini Conference title and being ranked in the top 10 of the Illinois Coaches Association Class 3A polls for a majority of the season.

Fairchild has spent the last four years at Dunlap after an extensive playing and coaching career. After being a standout at the University of Tulsa, Fairchild played professional softball for various teams across the country in the 2000s and 2010s and helped several of those squads win championships. She’s also spent over a decade combined as a Division I head coach at Quinnipiac and Purdue-Wayne. 

The Eagles finished 30-10 overall and 13-1 in Mid-Illini Conference play this past season and won their first sectional championship since 1992. That same year marked the team’s last state appearance. Fairchild guided a deep team that had several impactful seniors, such as Clutch Sports Media’s 2026 Softball Player of the Year, Sutton Centoni, but also had contributions from many other players, including underclassmen. Six Eagles players earned spots on Clutch Sports Media’s All-Area Softball Teams. Fairchild was recently named the ICA Class 3A Region 1 Coach of the Year as well.

Hear more about Fairchild’s season and career in our interview with her below. Some responses have been minimally edited for clarity. 

What have you been able to reflect on in the days since the season has ended? 

“I think what I've talked to people who've asked about the season and congratulated us, what seems to always come up for me is just realizing how much these players deserve the credit,” Fairchild said. “They wanted to be playing softball into June and it was something that they talked about from the very beginning and in October, really, when we started open field sessions. To me, it makes all the difference. There's so many different things that they could be doing. When you're the coach of the softball team that's pursuing an appearance at the state tournament, you would call them distractions, but to them, they're just choices. They have choices about how they spend their time and this team wanted to be playing softball well after their semester ended. That's what made it fun is they wanted to be there every step of the way, and they didn't want their last game to come. They wanted to keep playing.”

Whether it was things on the field or intangibles, what made the team so special this year?

“I think to your point, softball ability and skills and maturity aside, I think something that made this team special was the leadership,” Fairchild said. “I think it's really hard to find high school-aged student athletes who are willing to vocally lead and, at times, say the tough thing that needs to be said because they know far more about the overall approach that their teammates are taking, both on and off the field, than a coach ever would. They're with each other during the day, they socialize together in the evenings. I think something that was pretty special about this team is starting with the seniors, but also in our junior class, the willingness to say what needed to be said, when it needed to be said and that was unprompted by any coach. It was them. They seemed to know that if they wanted to get where they needed to go, there were times when they were going to have to have a tough conversation. Although I wasn't privy to those, I know they happened and I know that they kept the team on the right track.”

What’s your coaching background? 

“I just completed my fourth year with Dunlap, I did spend one year as an assistant coach there before taking over,” Fairchild said. “I started coaching in 2000 so I'm in year 26 of coaching softball, as well as strength and conditioning. I also have done some work at the college level with some volleyball and soccer programs, so it's been a long journey…but my primary coaching role has been with the sport of softball. I played professionally for many years and really, that pursuit of professional softball in the United States is what actually brought me to coaching. 

“If you know anything about the history of pro softball in the country, you know it's been tough to get it going and keep it going,” Fairchild said. “It's had many iterations, it's had many starts and stops, and so you never got paid much. But if you loved it, it was ‘What am I going to do for the next nine months?’ until the next season. And to be honest with you, as a younger post-collegiate player, coaching was a way to do that.”

What was your experience playing professional softball like?

“That's a very long, long story,” Fairchild said. “I guess you would take it all the way back to the 1998-99 season with a team called the Virginia Roadsters and was in, at that time, the WPSL, the Women's Professional Softball League. So from there, I went to play for a team in the same league under the same letters, called the Durham Dragons in Durham, North Carolina. And then from there, I moved on to the Georgia Pride and then that the league took a turn and renamed itself to WPF, or Women's Pro Fastpitch. And then I continued to play. I played with the Brequettes. I played with the Washington Glory. This was now under yet another name, National Pro Fast Pitch NPS. Then I played for the [Stratford] Brakettes, I played with the Washington Glory and the New York/New Jersey Juggernaut and then back to the Brakettes. It's quite a twisted tale as the league contracted and then tried to expand and contracted again. It was over the course of over 10 years, and then when the league kind of folded down for the last time, I played women's majors softball which is at the ASA women's majors levels. I played into my mid-40s.”

What helps keep you motivated?

“You know, I think the game, the biggest overarching motivator to keep doing it is the game gave me so much as a young player and as a kid as something constructive to pour my focus into,” Fairchild said. “It gave me opportunities to play in college. It gave me opportunities to travel internationally and play on all-star teams and across the world. I'm just so lucky to have experienced those things and it was all thanks to softball. And as a coach, I tried to help players who wanted to keep playing to find opportunities in Italy and in England and France when they didn't have opportunities in the United States. I guess I keep coming back to it to give back and to try to pay it forward. The game gave me so much, and it's just a matter of trying to give something back to it I guess.”

Aside from winning, what’s a fun memory with your players that you’ve had from this past season? 

“Every year, it's got to be when the kids are so excited that they actually want to ride the bus home,” Fairchild said. “It's required that you ride it to games, that's a district policy, but as a coach, you can make the decision if you want to force your players to ride the bus back to school every time we have a road game or do you want to let them go with their parents? The kids were just on such a roll and having so much fun down the stretch in the playoffs that they actually surprised the coaches after our LaSalle-Peru win and said, ‘We all want to ride the bus back.’ It's just usually one or two coaches or one with all the equipment riding back. It seems so so trivial, but it just warmed your heart to be like ‘They want to keep it going, and they don't even want this day, with the win under their belt, to end and they want to ride the bus home.’ That wasn't a close ride either, it was a good hour and a half on the bus stopping for ice cream in LaSalle and riding the bus home.”

“Then the send off that we got for state where a bunch of families and parents came out and they polished the bus and wrote fun messages all over the bus,” Fairchild said. “Then the Dunlap fire and police giving us an escort down the road to Louisville Slugger, we just felt so loved and supported. Those things are probably top of my mind [because] you never forget it. You never never forget how it made the kids feel to have that support. And as a coach, [you]  never forget how it felt for them to say, ‘You know what coach? We'll ride the bus.’”

What’s a piece of coaching advice you’d give or one that’s been helpful for you?

“I would say always understand that every player that you put on your roster will eventually fill a vital role for the team and its success, whether it is on the field or not,” Fairchild said. “If you can really open your eyes to the contributions that every single player on your team, whether you carry 12 or you carry 18, can make and will make, and if you can recognize that the team would not be the same without them, you will have a team that believes that together they can accomplish anything and as individuals, no matter how good they are, can't. That's what I would tell them, to always always always find the best in every kid and don't make it about softball skills. Make it about what they contribute to a high-functioning team. Everyone will thrive much much better if you can do that as a coach and stay with it and keep emphasizing it.”