School: Hatboro-Horsham
Softball
Favorite athlete: Chase Utley
Favorite team: Phillies
Favorite memory competing in sports: Coming back in the championship game when Pennsbury had a 3-1 lead and becoming state champs!
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Catching a foul ball and then running into the fence.
Music on iPod: Mixture of different genres!
Future plans: Attending Millersville to major in Early Childhood/Special Education and continuing my softball career
Words to live by: “Laugh your heart out. Dance in the rain. Cherish the memories. Ignore the pain, love and learn, forget and forgive because you only get one life to live.”
One goal before turning 30: Have a promising career in the field that I study.
One thing people don’t know about me: I love to eat food and never gain any weight!
Danielle DiFilippo was destined to become a collegiate softball pitcher.
Or at least so everyone thought.
But the Hatboro-Horsham senior’s softball career took a decidedly unexpected turn when – during her sophomore year – she developed back problems. Forced to give up playing a position she loved, DiFilippo became a first baseman.
It hasn’t held her back from achieving her goal of playing collegiate softball. Nor has it kept DiFilippo – who has signed a letter of intent to accept a softball scholarship to Millersville University – from excelling.
The recent Hatboro graduate batted cleanup and was the top run producer on a Hatter squad that captured the PIAA Class AAAA state championship. Making DiFilippo’s ride to the top even more special was the fact that she was playing for her father, first-year coach Joe DiFilippo.
“My dad is my like my best friend,” Danielle said. “Adding that on to our experiences that we have together – it just made me feel as though I’m leaving high school and going to college with this great experience with my dad, and nothing can beat doing that with your best friend.”
For her father, who has been coaching Danielle since she was eight, the state title was equally rewarding.
“Nothing can ever replace it,” he said. “Nothing ever will replace it.
“It happened around Father’s Day. It’s something I will never forget. It’s something we will have forever.”
Danielle admits she initially had some concerns when her dad talked to her about taking the job at Hatboro.
“I actually had a lot of worries about getting embarrassed and harassed at school about how my dad was the coach,” she said. “We sat down and talked about it for three days straight.
“I came to realize I’m playing for me at high school, and having him come in as coach didn’t really affect me. I was really happy that I was leaving high school with him as my coach.”
That’s not to say there weren’t some tense moments in the DiFilippo household.
“I got the worst part of it,” Danielle said. “If there was something going on at practice and we were all joking around – my dad was so grumpy toward me at the dinner table.
“There were some quiet dinner tables.”
“She took the brunt of a lot of things,” coach DiFilippo said. “If there was a bad practice, she heard about it when she got home.
“All in all, she knew when to go out of the house and get an ice cream cone.”
In truth, there were far more good dinner conversations than bad about a softball season that saw the Hatters lose just two games and complete the near-impossible trifecta – winning conference, district and state titles.
Nothing, however, compared to the Hatters’ 4-3 come-from-behind win over Pennsbury in the state title game at Penn State University.
“It’s unbelievable,” DiFilippo said. “During that moment, it was like, ‘Did we really just win?’
“Thinking about it now – I’m so happy we won, and we have done three things our high schools has never done before. It’s an unbelievable thing.”
DiFilippo has been playing softball since her earliest recollection. She also played travel soccer and gave basketball a try in middle school, but softball was her true passion.
“It was always softball,” she said. “I was always a pitcher. My brother (Shawn) used to be a pitcher too, and I just kept going with the family tradition.
“I just liked it a lot. I always wanted to be part of every pitch.”
DiFilippo worked hard at her sport, and when she began playing for the Hatboro Banshee’s on the highly competitive travel circuit at the age of 11, softball became a year-round sport. She spent hours working on her pitching, throwing to her dad and also working with a private coach.
Everything was going according to script until she was a sophomore pitching for the varsity.
“I don’t know what happened,” DiFilippo said. “Pitching just started hurting my back.
“I started doing this funky thing where my arm wouldn’t be straight and it would go behind my head – my arm was literally behind my back letting go of the ball. It just really hurt me.”
DiFilippo opted to take a short break from pitching with every intention of coming back in a month, but that didn’t happen.
“It never got better,” she said. “I think my back problem changed my motion. I tried to go to sling shot, and it just wasn’t working. It was really hard.”
That’s when DiFilippo made the permanent move to first base, the position she had played when she wasn’t pitching.
“I’m still in every play,” she said. “I just wasn’t in every pitch.
“I really liked pitching a lot because it was you controlling the game. I just had to get used to playing first base.”
For the final two years of her high school career, DiFilippo was a fixture at first base for her high school team. This spring, DiFilippo - a first team all-league selection – contributed a team-high 27 RBIs during the regular season and also had several game-winning hits.
“She had a lot of clutch hits,” coach DiFilippo said. “She has great bat control. I really could do anything with her.
“There were a lot of times I would suicide squeeze her. No one would expect your number four batter to bunt as much as she did. She does a push bunt past the second baseman that was very hard to field.”
DiFilippo boasts the kind of talent that caught the eye of college coaches.
“At first I thought playing first base would hurt my chances of playing in college, but after I started playing first and started hitting better than I’ve ever hit before, I realized I could still make it to college for softball,” DiFilippo said.
Interestingly, DiFilippo has not lost the pitching bug.
“My back doesn’t hurt any more, and I actually asked my dad if I could pitch this weekend,” she said. “Chrissy James used to be my catcher, and we said it’s meant to be that I came back because she and her dad cleaned out their garage and she found her old catching gear.
“During a break between games, I threw to her and she caught me. It felt good. I know I could do it – I was just scared I was going to hurt myself. I actually did better than I thought I would. It felt natural.”
This fall, DiFilippo will be taking her talents to Millersville University where she will play first base or outfield. She plans to major in Early Childhood/Special Education, an interest that was nurtured when she shadowed the life skills teacher at Simmons Elementary School.
“I just really got along with the kids, and I enjoy being around little kids,” she said. “It made me happy.”
Throw in the opportunity to play softball at the collegiate level, and it sounds like a winning combination.
