Meet the first woman to earn a baseball scholarship in the Northwest Athletic Conference
Without her mom’s mistake, maybe Luisa Gauci wouldn’t have been there — posing for a photo with a Green River College hat in one hand, grin covered by a surgical mask.
Maybe she wouldn’t have made it to the United States from Australia, to Driveline Baseball, to the moment she became the first woman to accept a baseball scholarship in the Northwest Athletic Conference — a league that includes community colleges in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.
Maybe she would have played softball instead, if her mom realized the sports were different. If she didn’t decide to sign her daughter up for baseball because the field was 5 minutes closer to their house.
Those 5 minutes changed the course of Gauci’s life — sending her to state and national baseball tournaments, summer leagues in North Carolina and California and a junior college in Los Angeles.
Eventually, Gauci made her way to Driveline — a data-driven baseball development program in Kent — where she started as a hitting intern and is now the Baseball Technologies Coordinator. Then, on Feb. 9, she signed with Green River. Gauci, who plays second base, will join the Gators for the 2021-22 season as one of the first women in the country to earn a baseball scholarship.
When Green River head coach Ben Reindel announced Gauci’s signing on Twitter, he wrote, “You’re old school if you don’t evaluate every deserving prospect.” Gauci was deserving, and Reindel said Green River subscribes to the philosophy of recruiting athletes based on what they can do rather than what they can’t. Reindel doesn’t want 45 athletes on his roster with the same strengths.
Right now, he said, Gauci is a player who can come in and deliver a quality at-bat.
“She also comes with the understanding that she needs to develop more of a defensive game — some arm strength, work on her speed,” Reindel said. “So there are things she needs to develop that every (junior college) athlete needs to develop. What she does have is she has a really good swing and the ability to get on base. She’s 5-foot-2 — just a small strike zone — and she works the count really well.”
‘I really don’t ever see myself not in baseball’
Gauci was turning on a second heater when she answered the phone last week. Driveline was closed that day due to snow, so Gauci spent four hours outside. She never saw snow in Brisbane, so Western Washington’s February snowstorm was only her second experience.
Gauci talked about the weather with the same enthusiasm she gives everything she’s passionate about — baseball, in particular. She told her story at full speed, with frequent stops for laughter and tangents. Her zeal reached its peak when the conversation turned to women in baseball, and her goals for the future. She has a five-year plan to become a hitting coordinator. Eventually, she would like to be a Major League Baseball assistant.
“Definitely like, leading the charge and coaching on the field,” Gauci said. “Just being a part of baseball in some way. I really don’t ever see myself not in baseball.”
Gauci has already created a 20-to-80 scouting scale for women. A staple for scouts, the scale grades players from 20 (poor) to 80 (top end) in areas such as hitting, power speed, defense and throwing arm. Using top women’s baseball events, like the Women’s Baseball World Cup, Gauci tailored the scale so women could understand how they matched up against their peers. She presented those findings during an American Baseball Research talk last September.
Gauci joked that she didn’t belong at a conference with some of baseball’s top analytical minds — she was just tired of being compared to men. And Gauci has never seen an obstacle she wasn’t determined to dismantle.
“If I’m running against a guy, of course I’m gonna be slower,” Gauci said. “I’m 5-foot-2, what do you want from me right now? If you compare me on a men’s scale, I don’t even rank on anything. Like how do I get to this point if you’re telling me I suck at baseball? Like no, I don’t suck at baseball. I’m actually pretty good.
“But it’s like, how do you quantify that and how do you say that to someone like on a piece of paper that I’m actually good at baseball? So, it’s just developing my own scale of women’s baseball — like this is actually the best in the world and this is where they compare and this is average. This is a women’s baseball scouting scale. This is how you count women in baseball.”
It’s more common for women to play baseball in Australia, and Gauci said she’s included in a group of three women — also her close friends — who commonly play for men’s teams. But the community is still small and internal, which makes it difficult for women to understand how they compare against the top athletes in the sport.
“(The scale) can be created where it’s like publicly available and girls are able to Google it and actually see where they’re at and where the best in the world are at,” Gauci said. “Because that’s something that doesn’t exist.”
As for a future in MLB, there’s a path for Gauci to follow.
Rachel Balkovec is a second-year minor league hitting coach for the New York Yankees, while Sarah Goodrum was recently promoted to minor league hitting coordinator for the Milwaukee Brewers. In November 2020, the Miami Marlins hired Kim Ng as the first female general manager. Jean Afterman is an assistant general manager for the Yankees. Alyssa Nakken is an assistant coach for the San Francisco Giants.
“I think she’d be a great hitting coordinator,” Reindel said. “She’s really good with tech. That’s one thing in the newer school of baseball, that you kind of have to understand the technology. … She understands that, so she’ll be able to coach players really well.
“As she gets older and teaches herself more stuff around the game, I think that she’ll benefit from being around a team atmosphere and getting the tools to be able to break down barriers more than she already has. Just her intelligence when it comes to data and understanding technology and understanding what that all means for a player.”
Tanner Stokey, Driveline’s lead hitting coordinator, has little reason to doubt Gauci.
“I wouldn’t put anything past her,” he said. “She’s definitely going to work hard enough to get to where she wants to get to and achieve whatever it is she decides she wants to.”
‘I just felt obsessed with training’
Gauci didn’t start playing baseball until she was 13, an age where she said most girls in Australia switch to softball. The other parents were surprised she kept coming back, but Gauci was in love with baseball — the camaraderie and the competitiveness — in a way she never was with softball.
At 16, Gauci began playing for men’s teams — squads that competed for state titles and traveled outside Australia for tournaments. By that time, she was good enough that nobody was telling her to switch sports anymore.
“It’s kind of a mindset, like, I’m not playing softball,” Gauci said. “It’s a completely different sport. I just feel like people don’t understand that. You can’t take away from me, like, the joys of baseball and the joys of being a part of that culture of baseball. That’s ridiculous. People compare it, but it’s completely different.”
Gauci sought out every experience she could find. If she wasn’t involved with a baseball team, she emailed and called coaches until she was. If she was cut, she showed up to practice anyway. Her parents started counting down the days until she had her driver’s license.
“I just felt obsessed with training, like getting better,” Gauci said. “I was never the best, so I just wanted to be the best so badly that I kept showing up to everything. It got me so much better so much quicker and it didn’t really matter that I didn’t play when I was younger because I made up the time where I would just train like all year round for the last four or five years. I’d just say yes to everything.”
She knew she wanted to play college sports in the United States, but the recruiting service she utilized — which helps place Australian athletes in American college athletics — told her baseball wasn’t an option. She had to play softball instead. Gauci reluctantly relented, making a softball recruiting video.
Then she met Oz Sailors at a baseball tournament in Hong Kong. Sailors, a woman who played baseball at the University of Maine - Presque Isle, invited Gauci to play in a summer baseball league in Virginia and North Carolina. That summer, Gauci had an experience she called both “super dodgy” and “one of the best times” of her life.
Staying in a rickety house with five teammates, Gauci practiced in an old tobacco warehouse and traveled every weekend. As the summer progressed, Gauci told Sailors her story — that she wanted to play college baseball but was denied the opportunity to try. Sailors gave Gauci advice she’s taken to heart ever since.
All you have to do is ask.
Back in Australia, Gauci emailed the recruiting service and said she was refusing to play softball. The only team that showed interest in her for baseball was a college in North Dakota — “literally the worst team in the country statistically.” Gauci was still planning to attend. But when the coach got fired, the new hire never responded to her emails.
‘They might actually be right’
As she waited to sort out her future, Gauci took up Olympic weightlifting after watching the sport during the Commonwealth Games — an international multi-sport event involving athletes from the Commonwealth of Nations. Knowing she had to get stronger for baseball, she decided to give it a try.
As a senior in high school, Gauci woke up every day at 5 a.m. to train. She got good enough to finish third in the state and earn a weightlifting scholarship at Menlo College in California. Gauci said she would come if she could also play baseball, and the school agreed.
But then a chance meeting with a United States national team baseball coach had her packing for California sooner than expected. In 2019, Gauci was an assistant for the 18-and-under Australian national team. When an outfielder was injured, Gauci grabbed her equipment from the trunk of her car to step in. Afterward, the surprised U.S. coach asked if she wanted to participate in a summer league in Los Angeles.
Never one to turn down an opportunity to play, Gauci headed to California. But while she was there, her plan started to crumble. Menlo College called with news — she could only play club baseball. Clubs sports compete competitively with other schools, but are not regulated by the NCAA or NAIA and don’t have varsity status. For Gauci, that wasn’t an option.
She told Murphy Su’a — her summer league coach who was also then the head coach at West Los Angeles College — what happened. When he offered her a spot on his roster, Gauci backed out of her commitment to Menlo College. She was the first woman to make West LA’s roster, but that season was disrupted by the COVID-19. The pandemic sent Gauci — redshirted shortly before the season started— back to Australia because she had nowhere to train.
“I was like, I get it,” Gauci said. “Redshirting, that’s fine. I’m not good enough. It was just I knew I was never going to be good enough. And then just hearing guys on my team or the coaches saying I shouldn’t be on the team, like I was never good enough in the first place. I was like, they might actually be right.”
But Gauci cared too much not to play, so she started searching for ways to train more efficiently.
That’s how she found Driveline — the player-development program in Kent — and a new trainer in Stokey.
‘She’s really resilient’
It became routine for Stokey to return to his phone after training to find 16 or 17 text messages waiting for him — questions followed by videos followed by assurances that the problem was solved. This, Stokey quickly learned, was life as Gauci’s trainer.
“She was a handful, for lack of a better phrase,” Stokey said with a laugh. “She was very needy in the past way possible. She absolutely abused me as her resource to get the absolute most out of me that she could.”
Stokey typically doesn’t hold online training, but he was participating due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gauci was the only woman to sign up, so Driveline’s manager wasn’t sure who to give her to. He chose Stokey.
“I would just harass the hell out of him,” Gauci said. “I sent him like 1,718 messages a day. I would send him messages. I would call him. I would just FaceTime him and send him so many videos because I just want to do better so badly.”
At the time, Gauci was also helping one of Driveline’s analysts with a project through Twitter. And when Driveline started looking to hire hitting analysts to assist with data collection, Gauci applied. She was soon on her way to Washington state.
“We kind of all decided that she would come here and work her ass off,” Stokey said. “She certainly has. I guess it was knowing the right people — or bothering the right people enough.”
Now, Gauci spends as much time at Driveline as just about anyone.
“It’s literally all she cares about, thinks about,” Stokey said. “She’s here 12 to 15 hours every day. Dedicated is the only word I can think of to describe her.”
One of Gauci’s future teammates can attest to that. Josh Parks, an outfielder for Green River, is at Driveline twice a day training for six hours. Gauci is there just as much, he said, if not more. So when Reindel, Green River’s head coach, called to inquire about Gauci, Parks gave her a glowing recommendation.
“Not everybody can train at Driveline like that,” Parks said. “It’s hard for people to understand. It takes a special kind of person to be able to train in their culture. … It’s a real test. it’s shows who really want to play the game and who doesn’t.
“That’s kind of what I told Ben. I was like, look, man, she’s got a lot of stereotypes (to deal with). She’s a girl playing baseball. She’s not very strong. She’s not very big. She’s not very intimidating. Guys tend to run her over. She has every reason to give in. But she really doesn’t. She’s really resilient. She’s the first person I’ve met that really has the same work ethic as me.”
Gauci splits her time between training, film work, doing reports and her duties as a hitting intern — a combination Parks isn’t sure he could handle.
“She’s a grinder,” Parks said. “She’s going to work. She might not be lighting it up, but she’s going to work to get better. She’s going to change the culture at Green River and what we’re trying to do. She’s also going to get guys in gear with what we’re trying to do.”
‘You only need one school to say yes’
Reindel knew of Gauci because of Green River’s programs and relationships with Driveline, but Gauci also wrote to every community college in Washington state with a baseball program. Green River was the only one that responded.
“(She’s) exactly what we look for,” Reindel said. “She’s the perfect recruit in that instance. She grinds in the weight room. She’s always developing. She’s smart. She communicates really well. If a coach recruits an athlete and they have those three or four things, that’s a home run signing in a way.”
Green River has a strong relationship with Driveline, Reindel has known the founder for a decade, and the Gators also have a history of signing Driveline athletes.
“I have a huge trust of Driveline athletes in general and what they do,” Reindel said. “We’re very different in how we kind of operate and how we evaluate and coach and develop even, and so our relationship (with Driveline) kind of works.”
As she talked to Reindel about joining Green River, Gauci told him she was only interested if he believed she could see the field. She’s aware of her weaknesses. It’s obvious, she said, that male players will be faster and stronger. While the discrepancy is sometimes frustrating, Gauci has learned to play to her strengths.
“That’s why I play second base where my arm, I can get away with it,” Gauci said. “That’s fine. At the plate, I have a really good approach where I don’t try to hit home runs. I just try to hit solid line drives to the outfield just to get on base.
“I’m a a solid person that a coach can rely on to get things done in big situations. That’s kind of how I have to be. That’s taken a lot of time to think about — talking to other people where it’s like, how am I going to win? How am I going to be a good player that is going to provide value on the team and off the field?”
What excites Parks the most is Gauci’s commitment to the Driveline culture. That’s the kind of mindset he wants to bring to Green River, and he knows Gauci will lead the way.
“Not settling for mediocrity, the whole data-driven approach. We have that approach every day,” Parks said. “We’re really getting after it. We’re really pushing the envelope. This bar that we’ve set is not good enough. We need to set a higher bar. That’s really what she’s going to bring to the team.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Meet the first woman to earn a baseball scholarship in the Northwest Athletic Conference."
