Chabot Softball Has Family Feel Under Kravets

Family ties are important to Chabot College softball coach Megan Kravets.

Kravets and her husband, Denis, are raising two young children, Kristina, 6, and Alexander, 4, in Castro Valley, and the Gladiators are like her second family. Players can always look to each other and the coaching staff for strength and guidance.
“I’m very family oriented … I want the softball team to be somewhere where people feel they’re heard and understood and they have a place where they can be comfortable and enjoy the sport,” Kravets said this week.
Kravets describes herself as “kind” and “honest,” and her strong athletic background in softball and soccer attests to her drive. The former De Anza College and Menlo College softball star likes the balance of her current 18-player Chabot squad, which has six key returners.
“All of them are pretty equal in their talents,” she says of the squad. “I don’t think there’s a standout player. They all work pretty well together and if one makes an error another picks them up.”
Kravets, who receives great support from assistant coach Mikka Dixon, had the challenge of rebuilding the Chabot program basically from scratch after being hired in 2018. She started out by rifling through a stack of about 1,000 player surveys, to see which players might be a good fit.
Consider the 2020-21 school year the third step in a rapid evolution for the Chabot program.
“That first year was a struggle,” she recalls. “We ended up having about 23 players and then the numbers started to wind down because we needed to filter out those that fit my coaching style and the way I wanted the program to go. This past season obviously got interrupted (due to the covid-19 shutdown); we did have a stronger team with players that we were able to recruit ourselves.
“We worked really hard to try to get out there and let athletes and the high schools know that Chabot was back. We were ready to get things turned around, especially after not having a program two years prior to that,” Kravets says.
The upcoming Chabot season won’t begin until April and the team will play an abbreviated schedule.
As part of an active family growing up in San Jose, Kravets had an extensive playing career in soccer and softball: “I kind of went from there. It’s what I knew best and what I felt comfortable doing,” she says.
After excelling in sports at Leland High-San Jose, she was first-team All-Conference twice in softball at De Anza College, and broke several school records over two seasons at Menlo College. She has also been head softball coach at De Anza (rebuilding that program) and Pinewood School-Los Altos. She has been an assistant coach at De Anza and Menlo College.
Kravets has an evenly balanced squad this time around. Players are stepping up and showing improvement, she says.
“They love softball,” Kravets says. “They’re not there because they have to be or just because they should try out for a team. It’s definitely been a huge change from the first year, so we’re really excited about it.”