Zoe Hicks, the Canadian national baseball team’s MVP last season, missed the squad’s recent selection camp but had a good reason — she was busy gearing up for the Women’s Softball World Cup that opened Monday in Castions di Strada, Italy.
And so begins a unique stretch for the 26-year-old from Boissevain, Man., who will go from wearing the maple leaf at one international tournament to another, bound for the Women’s World Baseball World Cup in Thunder Bay, Ont., July 28-Aug. 3 once done with her softball mates.
It’s precisely the type of summer she envisioned when she left a baseball tech job with the Los Angeles Dodgers a year ago, where she worked with rookie-ball players at the club’s spring facility in Arizona but found “that I wasn’t ready to hang my cleats up.”
“I noticed doing the job I definitely wasn’t ready to step away from the game,” she says during a recent interview. “If I gave myself the ability to play out my own career, I felt I could be a better coach when I stopped and I was at peace with it, so I can really help people grow in their own game, knowing that I’m done.”
Hicks is very far from done.
She’s a first baseman and catcher with the softball squad, which is ranked fifth in the world, and heads across the diamond to the hot corner for the baseball team, which is down to 16th due to the lingering effects from pandemic disruptions.
Hicks became a dual threat on the field serendipitously.
Home from the summer after her first season playing softball at Iowa Western Community College, a family friend was short players for a senior baseball tournament and invited her out.
Always down for some ball, she said yes, Team Manitoba’s coach spotted her there, asked if she was interested in playing and suddenly she was a baseball player, too. Switching between the sports is fairly straightforward for her, requiring only minor tweaks.
“Softball you have to fire off your swing a lot quicker. There’s just less time between when the pitcher releases it and when you’re supposed to hit it,” Hicks explains. “With baseball, you have a little bit more time to adjust and you can have a little bit of a bigger load. But I try to keep them as consistent as possible just because the turnaround time is so quick.”
Hicks has a long and varied resume to draw from when she competes, too.
She spent two seasons at Iowa Western, a junior college, before transferring to Louisiana Tech, where she played in 115 games from 2019-2021. During that time, when COVID-19 shut down baseball at home, she became the first woman to play in the now-defunct Expedition League, a wood-bat collegiate baseball summer league.
After graduation, she played professional softball for Sparks Haarlem in the Netherlands before joining the Dodgers, which led her to this summer, her second season with the national softball team and third on the baseball side.
“Playing for two teams is almost a little bit extra motivation for an off-season — it’s not just 20 girls that are holding me accountable, expecting me to be my best in the summer. It’s now like 50 girls and all these teammates that care about me and that I care about,” she says. “So it just a little bit extra oomph of like, I have like a whole football team out there rooting for me. It helps when the off-season gets a little bit long and you’re training by yourself and hoping for the summer to come quickly.”
Now it’s here and it’s going to be busy.
The Canadians open against the defending champion United States, then face China on Tuesday and Italy on Wednesday.
Canada finished third when the Softball World Cup was last held in 2018 but earned its spot in the finals after finishing second at the Women’s Softball World Cup Group C tournament last year.
Hicks was a part of that team, as well as the baseball team that qualified for this summer’s event at the first-stage tournament, also hosted by Thunder Bay, last year. Canada finished third the last time the Women’s Baseball World Cup was held in 2018.
“For me, it’s filling the different roles that I have,” Hicks says of her approach to this summer. “Both of teams have embraced me and who I am on the field — super loud, super energetic. I feel like I am my best self, my most authentic self with both teams. I would say the coaches are very similar. You’re going out having a good time and appreciating the game. And then when it comes down to business, you’re performing. I’m incredibly lucky.”