Jessica Pistole, the architect of one of the most dominant periods for any team in NAIA softball history, completed her 10th season at Southern Oregon University in 2025 with a fourth national championship and a fourth NAIA Coach of the Year award.
SOU has turned dynastic while going 469-138 with Pistole at the helm. When she took over as head coach in 2015, the Raiders had never before qualified for an NAIA World Series. They’ve since advanced seven of the last eight postseasons and are one of three schools in NAIA history to have captured four titles, collecting each of them within a six-year span.
Pistole – who owns a 591-234 overall record in 15 seasons as a head college softball coach – has a .773 winning percentage at SOU, the second-highest among 24 active NAIA coaches with at least 400 wins. Her Raiders have also been on the NAIA Scholar Team list every season, and in 2022-23 she was named the NAIA Coach of Character after receiving the Cascade Conference Coach of Character award in 2019.
The Raiders won an average of 17 games in the eight seasons that preceded Pistole’s arrival. They experienced an 18-win turnaround in her first year, qualified for the NAIA National Tournament for the first time in a decade in her second, and advanced to their first NAIA World Series in her third. SOU hasn’t missed a national postseason since her debut campaign.
Pistole led SOU to its first national title in 2019, finishing 52-8 and defeating powerhouse Oklahoma City in the championship round to garner the Oregon Sports Awards’ George Pasero Team of the Year award. She departed shortly after to take over NCAA Division I program University of San Diego, but, following a COVID-abbreviated campaign with the Toreros, she came back to Ashland for the 2021 season.
Months after her return, the Raiders were national champs again – setting a school wins record for the fourth consecutive full season at 55-6 after surviving five straight elimination games in a run capped by an extra-innings defeat of rival Oregon Tech. After falling short of the World Series in 2022, they returned in 2023 to outscore their four opponents 35-2 combined, posting the highest run total and top run differential ever among teams that have gone undefeated at the final site. Once again, their final-round victim was Oregon Tech.
Pistole’s latest championship, secured in 2025, was unprecedented for a different reason. After losing their World Series opener, the Raiders became the first team in the tournament’s 44-year history to win seven consecutive elimination games.
Pistole was named the NAIA Coach of the Year after each of the titles. She is a four-time CCC Coach of the Year, taking the award in 2016, ’18, ’19 and ’21. Her teams celebrated conference regular-season titles each of those seasons, were CCC co-champions in 2025, and won three conference tournament championships from 2017-19.
Three Raiders have become NAIA Players of the Year under Pistole: Harlee Donovan (2018), Lauren Quirke (2021) and Riley Donovan (2022). Ten more have earned All-America recognition, and in 2025 the Raiders produced a freshman NAIA Pitcher of the Year and World Series MVP in Ayla Davies.
The defining quality of Pistole’s teams has been toughness: since 2017, they’ve gone 30-4 in national tournament elimination games and 12-5 against teams seeded higher than them at the World Series. The last time they were outside of the NAIA Top 25 poll was during the 2017 preseason.
Pistole arrived at SOU following a two-year stint at Twin Falls High School, where she led her team to an Idaho 4A state title. Prior to that gig she served as a head coach at California-based NAIA schools Biola and William Jessup, and then for one year as an assistant at Utah State.
Coming out of Del Oro High School (Calif.), Pistole was recruited to Biola to play volleyball but ended up playing four years of softball, too. She was a three-time All-American with a career earned-run average of 0.79 and batting average of .340 while obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in health psychology. Upon the completion of her degree and playing career in 2002, she was immediately given Biola's head softball coaching job and helped the Eagles to a 51-46 record in two seasons, including a 26-19 record in her last.
Pistole took over the William Jessup volleyball program in 2006. After three years as head coach, she proposed and executed the formation of Jessup's softball program – raising all the funds needed for scholarships and travel. In the program's second season, she guided the Warriors to the 2011 California Pacific Conference championship, earning Cal Pac Coach of the Year honors as a result. In her two seasons as softball coach, she placed 15 players on the all-conference team and compiled a 56-38 record.
After a year as an assistant at Utah State, Pistole arrived in Twin Falls. In both seasons her team won the District 4 title and she was named Great Basin Athletic Conference Coach of the Year, and her state championship squad had a team batting average of .447, a team ERA of 1.33, and a team GPA of 3.73.
In her lone season at San Diego, the Toreros went 15-12.
She was also a National Association of Sports Medicine Certified Personal Trainer from 2005-2011.
Pistole and her husband, Bryan, reside in Ashland and have five children: Glory, Wynn, Kuyper, Tennyson and Beckett.