Playing softball at Greensboro College may have been written in stone for Brittani Goddard years ago.
By the time she was ten years old, Goddard knew she wanted to be a college player. She was a young North Carolina softball fan who was a regular for games at Anderson Stadium in Chapel Hill starting in 2017.
When Goddard registered for UNC’s ‘Lil Sis program, which allows children in first-through-six grades to adopt a player as a friend, role model or mentor, she was paired with Megan Dray, a second-team All-ACC selection in 2019.
It was a natural relationship. Like Dray, Goddard was also a catcher.
“We wrote letters back and forth the whole time,” Goddard said. “I talk to her after games all the time. We talked about softball and life.”
After years of being Goddard’s mentor, Dray will now be one of her college coaches.
Goddard, a senior catcher at Cedar Ridge, has formally signed to play at Greensboro. It’s where Dray, now officially Megan Dray Martin, has served as an assistant the past two years.
Last month, Goddard signed with Greensboro during a ceremony at the J-Wing at Cedar Ridge. She was there with her mother, Julia Champion, who Goddard says was the most instrumental in the recruiting process.
Greensboro, a Division III school in the USA South Conference, is led by head coach Brianna Strickland. In her first season in 2025, Strickland compiled a 30-14 record for the Pride.
“I really like the school and the program,” Goddard said. “I want to do physical therapy and they have a really good sports medicine program.”
Goddard started playing softball when she was eight years old on Collins Field with HYAA.
Last season, Goddard hit.269 with 18 hits, seven doubles and 15 RBIs for a Cedar Ridge team that finished 17-8 overall. The Red Wolves wound up second in the Central Conference and defeated West Johnston in the opening round of the 3A State Playoffs in Hillsborough, it’s first postseason win since 2019.
Goddard played 21 games her sophomore season.
Through her young life, Goddard has been a woman for all seasons. As an adolescent, she had stints as a dancer, a gymnast and in volleyball. For each of her four years at Cedar Ridge, she has been a football cheerleader. As a freshman and a sophomore she was a basketball player under head coach Megan Skouby. This winter, she became a basketball cheerleader.
But softball was her first love.
She started at the Cedar Ridge varsity with childhood friend Victoria Matthews. Together, they’re now seniors on a Cedar Ridge team that has defeated crosstown rival Orange four straight times, most recently last week.
As she played travel ball with NC Rockers in middle school, Goddard sought private instruction from Kate Kantor, who was the first assistant hired by Duke head softball coach Marissa Young at the very beginning of the Blue Devils’ softball program in 2017.
Kantor had put in five years of work with college athletes and was a member of three Atlantic Coast Conference championship teams at Georgia Tech from 2009-to-2012. Everything was going great in Goddard’s first session with Kantor in 2018 when they reached the front toss portion of the lesson, where Kantor would throw the ball to Goddard standing 15 feet away and she would hit it.
After five minutes of soft tosses, the total amount of pitches that Goddard hit: zero.
“That’s when I realized I would have a lot of work ahead of me,” Kantor said.
Goodard whiffed on every single one except the final toss.
That was a foul tip.
“That’s when we called it a lesson,” Kantor recalled. “I drove away from that lesson thinking that was the first time I ever experienced anything like that before. I was used to college players and I had never had an athlete that couldn’t touch the ball to save her life.”
On the ride home, Kantor knew this would be a long-term process but vowed if Goddard was committed to learning, she would be committed to teaching her.
“Over the last eight years, I’ve watched this kid grow from a player who would rather bunt every single at-bat than swing to a young lady who is hitting home runs,” Kantor said.
At her signing ceremony, Kantor asked Goddard to remember where she started and how hard she worked to reach this point.
“Transformation didn’t happen overnight or by accident,” Kantor said at the ceremony. “It took years of sweat, hard workouts, hard conversations and sheer stubbornness, at times. Over these next four years, when you’re facing periods when you’re upset with your playing time, when you’re disappointed with your performance, when the workouts are hard and the practices are long. Or maybe it’s just one of those days when you can’t hit anything off the front toss or that one foul tip at the very end, I pray that you remember to persevere and have that same spunky little attitude that kept you going eight years ago.”
