King/Drew senior Jordan Garcia is a pitcher for the Golden Eagles softball team. She has been a Varsity pitcher since the ninth grade.
Pitching for an entire game is something Garcia is used to doing. Her pitching career started at 11 years old.
“Pitching two hours now it’s easier but it takes a lot of not even physical strength but mental strength,” Garcia said. “Those times when your team is going down and your feel the energy dropping, you still have to be the one to be like “it’s fine” because they’re looking at you every play.”
Garcia was team captain as a sophomore. She helped resolve communication issues that the team once had.
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“Being a leader, they look up to me, they come up to me all the time, asking me questions,” Garcia said. “At school, we all hang out all the time.”
Along with playing softball for King/Drew, Garcia plays travel ball. She has known her travel ball teammates since the age of 10. The team encourages players to prioritize their academics.
“If we had homework to do but we still had to go to practice, we had a whole room to just do homework,” Garcia said. “Do homework for 30 minutes, go hit, come back, do homework.”
King/Drew softball coach Chay Robinson holds Garcia and her teammates accountable for their schoolwork. She also consoled Garcia when she struggled with transitioning from travel ball to high school softball.
“Coach [Robinson], she’s a person who I can go to if I feel like I’m being dramatic,” Garcia said. “There’s times where I really was like “I don’t think I can do it anymore” and she would send me these long paragraphs of how I mean so much to this team.”
For Garcia, being a student athlete comes with challenges but the faculty at King/Drew help her excel.
“The academics are so hard, the teachers are really hard on you but they care for you. They want you to succeed,” Garcia said. “They want everyone to succeed and they want all the student athletes to be able to do both.”
Garcia aspires to be a vet radiologist and work on a farm.
“I want to be able to do X-Rays on pigs and cows and work on the farm and be able to provide for my family like how my mom’s giving me so much,” Garcia said. “I might want to move out to Alabama, North Carolina and buy land, have a whole bunch of animals.”
