Raiders standout becomes first NAIA softball player to win both major NFCA awards in the same season

ASHLAND — Southern Oregon’s Ayla Davies maxed out her 2025 awards haul on Monday when the National Fastpitch Coaches Association named her its NAIA Freshman of the Year and Pitcher of the Year.

Never before had an NAIA softball player received both major awards from the NFCA in the same season.

A week ago, Davies earned the official NAIA Pitcher of the Year tag from the national office. A week before that, she took home the NAIA World Series MVP award. Stretching back to last month, she was the first freshman ever to collect the Cascade Conference Pitcher of the Year award.

Her historic freshman ledger bears repeating: 38-5 with six saves, a 1.20 ERA, 36 complete games, 19 shutouts, and 312 strikeouts over 297 innings. She recorded more wins, complete games and shutouts than any pitcher in the country in the last decade.

Through the first 20 appearances of her career, Davies’ ERA stood at 0.61. By the end of the season she’d allowed one or no earned runs in 27 of 39 starts. Of her five losses, she took four in extra innings and pitched at least 10 frames in three of them.

Davies logged 19 of her wins against Top 25 opponents.

She was at her best in the World Series, at one point blanking four opponents in a five-game span during SOU’s run of seven consecutive elimination-game victories. In Game 1 of the championship round against Oklahoma City, she became the first pitcher to shut out the Stars in 210 games.

Davies is the first Raider to claim the Freshman of the Year award and the second to get the NFCA’s Pitcher of the Year designation after Gabby Sandoval (2019).