The long road: Baseball, college basketball led Boise State’s Kelsey Lalor to softball
Boise State softball coach Maggie Huffaker didn’t pay it much attention the first time the Broncos’ former baseball coach Gary Van Tol mentioned Kelsey Lalor.
“He starts telling me about this girl who played for the Canadian National women’s baseball team and now plays college basketball,” Huffaker told the Statesman. “Honestly, I thought it was kind of weird and brushed it off.”
Van Tol persisted. He’s known Lalor’s father, Dwayne, since the 1980s. They grew up in the same province near Alberta, and played in many of the same tournaments.
Van Tol also knows Lalor’s cousin, Jason Chatwood, whom he recruited while at Gonzaga. He assured Huffaker that she came from good stock and had what it took to be a special player.
“If I had enough room on my roster, I would have recruited her to play baseball,” Van Tol told the Statesman on Friday. “Her dad is a great guy and a fierce competitor, and knowing her bloodlines, I had a pretty good idea of what she was made of.”
It was Chatwood who supplied Van Tol with an old highlight reel of Lalor playing baseball, and he sent it to Huffaker, who said it was so grainy she could barely make out the ball. She brushed it off again.
It wasn’t until Van Tol sent a second clip of much better quality that something caught Huffaker’s eye.
“You see that second video and you’re like ‘OK, there’s some pop there,’” Huffaker said. “She’s still learning the game, but she’s fantastic. Everything just kind of fell in place to bring her here.”
Lalor never played softball growing up. She never even faced underhanded pitching until she arrived at Boise State in 2019, but the redshirt junior has become a fixture in the Broncos’ batting order and opened this spring as the starter in center field.
She first joined the team as a shortstop and played right field last year.
“She has a cannon for an arm, she sees the field really well and she does a great job directing traffic,” Huffaker said. “She has a really high softball IQ from a lot of the things she learned playing baseball.”
‘The game doesn’t change’
Lalor grew up a multisport athlete in Red Deer, Alberta, starring on the basketball, volleyball and track teams at Lindsay Thurber High.
Both her parents were physical education teachers and coaches. Her mother, Kathy, was her high school basketball coach. Dwayne, who played at Washington State, was her baseball coach for much of her childhood.
Playing for her parents wasn’t always a positive experience, but Lalor said she’s a better athlete because of it.
“You kind of get a bad rep being the coach’s kid, but I think that just made me work that much harder so people couldn’t say ‘that’s why she’s playing,’” Lalor said.
She started playing baseball against the boys when she was 5 years old, and she stuck with the same group as they climbed the ranks of the rec leagues, even as many of the other girls on the team turned to softball or other sports.
“It’s definitely weird being the only girl on the field, but I got really lucky and played with a great group of guys,” Lalor said. “They’re still some of my best friends back home.”
The experience made her tougher, Huffaker said. But more than that, Lalor said growing up playing against the boys made her smarter.
“I was challenged every day because the boys have some advantages: they’re faster, they throw it harder, they’re stronger,” Lalor said. “So, I had to work on improving my baseball IQ and finding ways to take advantage of my strengths.”
Overcoming those advantages made trotting back to the dugout after a win all that much sweeter.
“It’s great when you beat them because they always get mad they got beat by a girl,” she said.
Her opportunities on the diamond started to fade when Lalor began high school, but she turned to the international game. She first made the Canadian National women’s baseball team when she was 15 and played in her first World Cup the following year.
In all, she played for Team Canada in three World Cups, a couple of qualifying tournaments and the 2015 PanAm games in Toronto.
“Playing for your country is honestly one of the coolest experiences ever,” she said. “It’s something you never forget.”
She’ll never forget playing Team USA in her first World Cup in Japan.
After a rain delay, she was called on to pinch hit with two outs and the bases loaded in a tied game and she snuck an RBI single through the infield. Canada lost, but she’ll never forget overcoming her nerves at the plate and feeling the bat make contact with the ball.
In the 2018 World Cup, she helped Canada knock off Team USA in extra innings. She has played on the big stage so many times it takes a lot to get her nervous these days, no matter the stakes.
“The first time you play Team USA or Japan, it’s a whole different feeling,” Lalor said. “You’re playing against the best in the world and you just kind of get back into the mindset that it’s all just a game. It doesn’t matter who is on the other team. The game doesn’t change.”
A new environment
Lalor wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for when she left University of Saskatchewan after three seasons on the women’s basketball team.
She knew she wanted a new environment, and after watching the College World Series on TV, she wanted to give softball a try.
“Seeing the atmosphere on TV, it looked like it was so much fun and everyone loved being out on the diamond,” Lalor said.
The allure of playing for one of Canada’s most successful women’s college basketball programs drew her to Saskatchewan. The Huskies have won six Canada West titles since 2005, and they captured the national championship the year before she arrived in 2016.
Lalor was a point guard, and she helped the Huskies win two Canada West titles and make the national tournament all three years she was on the team. In 2019, she averaged 5.2 points and four rebounds a game and shot 40% from the floor, helping Saskatchewan finish as national runner-up.
Huffaker said she isn’t sure if there are many physical skills that translate from the basketball court to the softball diamond, but she’s a former basketball player herself, and she knows the discipline the sport demands.
“If my high school coach walked in here today and told me to give her 100 push-ups, I’m dropping down and doing them,” Huffaker said. “The discipline of basketball makes you a better athlete, and Kelsey understands that. She comes to work everyday, and she’s the type of player that you have to tell to stop sometimes.”
She’s still new to the sport, but Lalor’s power at the plate is evident. She was leading the team with four home runs last year when the season was cut short by COVID-19.
This season, she leads the team with six home runs, 11 RBI and a .515 slugging percentage. She has started all 23 games, and she’s No. 3 on the team with a .235 batting average.
Lalor generally hits near the middle of the lineup, though Huffaker had her lead off in a game early in the season. She’s dropped a little this spring as the Broncos’ coach said she was looking for more production near the bottom of the order.
“It’s high risk, high reward,” Huffaker said. “She’s going to swing and miss more, but she’s also going to hit for more power. She’s still an RBI threat every time she comes up.”
Huffaker said all Lalor is lacking is experience. After all, she only has 104 at-bats in her softball career.
The good news for Lalor and the Broncos is she’ll have an extra year to gain that experience at Boise State. She plans to take advantage of the extra eligibility offered by the NCAA and return for the 2022 season.
She’ll graduate this spring with an undergraduate degree in sociology and plans to complete a double major next year with a degree in kinesiology. After that, she’s thinking about sticking with her newly discovered favorite sport as a coach and hopes to get on somewhere as a graduate assistant.
“I love the sport of softball, and if I can impact players lives, that’s all I really want to do,” she said.
This story was originally published April 4, 2021 at 4:00 AM.
