Softball
Favorite athlete: Jennie Finch
Favorite team: UMBC
Favorite memory competing in sports: Playing softball with my best friends Daria Edwards and Maria Spinosa for 10 years.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: When I was at my first showcase tournament and the first time I played with TNT, I let go of my bat in the middle of a swing, and it hit the first base fence line, and I had to awkwardly run past college coaches to pick it up.
Music on iPod: Anything country
Future plans: Attend UMBC and later go on to become a Physician’s Assistant.
Words to live by: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
One goal before turning 30: Complete college and settle down with a family.
One thing people don’t know about me: I’m color blind.
By Mary Jane Souder
Nicole Casagrand grew up with the dream of being a softball pitcher.
“When I was little, I always dreamed of being exactly like Jennie Finch,” the Hatboro-Horsham senior said of the USA National Team pitcher who led her squad to Olympic gold. “That was my dream.”
Unfortunately, Casagrand’s first travel coach wasn't interested in nurturing that dream.
“He said, ‘You’re too short. You’re not going to be a pitcher when you’re older. I don’t think you can make it. I think you should stop,’” Casagrand recalled.
Instead of heeding his advice, Casagrand decided to use it as motivation.
“That really made me angry,” she said. “How can you tell a seven-year-old that?
“Every year I would think back on that and think, ‘All right, I’m not going to let that coach win.’”
He didn’t win.
Casagrand did, turning her talents in the circle into a scholarship to play softball at UMBC. Not a bad ending for a young athlete who was told she was too small to succeed as a pitcher.
This past spring, Casagrand came back from an injury that threatened to sideline her the entire season to lead the Hatters to sole possession of the SOL Continental Conference crown.
“This kid – I tell you what – for everything she went through, waiting her turn behind Maggie Shaffer – it never bothered her,” coach Joe DiFilippo said. “I don’t even know how to explain it.
“She stepped up so big this year after being hurt.”
Casagrand says she began experiencing pain last July while pitching for her elite travel team, TNT.
“I kept playing because we qualified for nationals, and I was one of the two pitchers we had,” she said. “We went to Gold Nationals, and I wanted to have that experience, so I kept pushing through.”
By October, the pain became intolerable.
“I kept trying to pitch through it, but finally I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I have a scholarship on the line. I need to get better.”
After an initial consultation with a doctor at Penn, Casagrand was sent to a well-known shoulder specialist, and it was determined she would not need surgery as initially anticipated.
“They started me little by little at physical therapy,” she said. “My therapist would catch me when I was pitching.
“They took video of my motion and broke it down – put it in slow motion and saw the exact moment when the pain would start. They really got down to the nitty gritty stuff.”
The diagnosis – a pinched nerve in her neck and a partial tear of her rotator cuff, and for close to six months, Casagrand – who underwent therapy - was shut down.
“I would sit in my room and practice my spins just so I could stay sharp,” she said. “I did what I could.
“Oh my gosh, it drove me insane. I kept pushing my therapist, ‘Can I play yet, can I play yet?’”
Finally, on March 7, Casagrand was given the green light to begin pitching but admits she didn’t feel like herself until midway through the season.
“I lost 5-7 miles per hour, and that was really heartbreaking because I worked so hard to get the speed,” she said. “The first few games I pitched, it was freezing cold, and my arm would be killing me afterwards. I would be sore for a whole week after pitching one game. As it got warmer, my shoulder started to feel a lot better. I started getting back into it.”
No one was happier to have her back than DiFilippo.
“I was working with other kids pitching,” he said. “What am I going to do?
“Nicole worked at it the whole time, and once she was cleared, she was in the gym with us every night throwing. She worked hard to get back.”
Casagrand, according to her coach, has been a leader since she became a fulltime starter as a junior.
“I had her playing right field at the beginning of the year, and she always gave 110 percent,” DiFilippo said. “She made a couple of errors, and she came up to me and said, ‘Coach Joe, I’m not an outfielder,’ and I said, ‘You know what, we realize that.’
“She never said a word, tried her hardest and came and played first base. At first I was hesitant to put her there because she’s not the tallest, but she makes up for it in heart. She went after everything.”
Casagrand has been playing softball for as long as she can remember and got her start in travel when she was seven years old, playing for the U10 Horsham Banshees.
“I really, really liked it even though I wasn’t that good at that age because I was so tiny, but I really wanted to play travel with my sister, Kristin,” she said.
At the age of 10, Casagrand began working with pitching coach Vanessa Sadowl and two years later went to Roy Jenderko, who remains her pitching coach.
As a freshman, she was the back-up varsity pitcher and continued in that role for the next three years before stepping into a starter’s role this season and leading her team to a conference crown.
“It was really amazing,” Casagrand said. “Especially because when we first started the season, no one thought anything of us, which was heartbreaking to our team.
“All the seniors were there when we won states our sophomore year, and now they were talking about us like, ‘Oh, they’re going to be nothing.’
“We would get fired up and pumped up, and we knew that every game was going to be hard. We just tried to stay focused. I remember we were sitting on the bus when we found out we clinched the (conference) title by ourselves. We were screaming, we were letting everybody know that something good just happened. It was an amazing experience.”
Casagrand and her teammates would have liked to rewrite an ending that saw the Hatters fall a game short of advancing to the state tournament, but that could not detract from a special season.
“We had the most incredible team chemistry ever,” she said. “Coach Joe usually doesn’t get upset, but (it) really hit him hard this year because we were so close.
“We were always having good times at practices. When I think of my high school experience, if I ever thought of it without softball, it’s weird to me. I don’t understand how people go through high school without playing a sport. That doesn’t make sense.”
For his part DiFilippo can’t imagine the team without Casagrand as part of it.
“As a sophomore, she sat on the bench the year we won the state title,” he said. “She never complained. Whenever you call on her, she does what she’s got to do. She’s just a great kid.
“Out of all the teams I’ve coached, the chemistry on this team was the best, and she was one of the ones that made that chemistry happen. She and Heather Lutz were tremendous.”
DiFilippo, who admits he was “down in the dumps” after his team’s season-ending loss to Central Bucks East in the district quarterfinals, received a text from Casagrand after the game, thanking him for giving her the opportunity to pitch, for always challenging her as a player and for always believing in her.
“That’s the kind of kid she was,” DiFilippo said.
Casagrand is a winner off the field as well.
An excellent student, she is a member of the National Honor Society as well as the choir, Future Business Leaders of America and Interact, a community service group. She is also a student mentor for freshmen.
Next fall, she will be majoring in psychology at UMBC with the goal of one day becoming a physician’s assistant, a decision that was confirmed when she job shadowed at a nurse’s office this semester.
“I was really interested in physical therapy at first, but I took kinesiology last semester,” Casagrand said. “We learned everything about the body, and I honestly thought it was the coolest thing ever.”
If the past is any indication, Casagrand will undoubtedly make this dream a reality as well.
