Alicia Hansen’s transition to softball fulfilled her dream of playing for Syracuse

Alicia Hansen walked into her grandfather’s basement for another baseball practice. The basement was about 15-feet wide, and though the turf-padded walls and batting screen weren’t much, it was enough for Hansen to practice.

Each night, Hansen’s grandmother yelled from upstairs about the constant thuds from balls crashing into the ceiling. The basement ceiling wasn’t high enough for Hansen and her grandfather, John Prichard, to throw back and forth while standing on their feet. So they got on their knees. The two played catch, kneeling on the turf that Prichard had installed.

One by one, the more they played, the lightbulbs cracked, falling from the ceiling and crashing into hundreds of small pieces. Even as bulbs broke, the play continued. Hansen rocketed balls off the padded walls of the basement, developing skills she could use on the actual baseball diamond.

“It wasn’t a big space at all, but we went down there at any time of any day,” Hansen said.

Now a senior at Syracuse, Hansen always wanted to play baseball at SU. The only problem: SU didn’t have a baseball team. Hansen never wanted to make the switch over to softball. But to go to her dream school, she had no choice.

Hansen’s transition to softball began on a spring Thursday night when she was 12 years old. Less than two years later, she began her career as a 5-year shortstop at Liverpool High School, which led to a four-year starting career at SU in multiple positions.

Even as other schools recruited Hansen, she turned them down. She only wanted to play for Syracuse, not just because it was only 11 miles from home, but because it gave the man who introduced her to baseball a chance to attend games and practices.

“My grandpa got me to where I am today,” Hansen said. “I would not have the skillset I have if it wasn’t for him. I think I owe it to him to play where he can see me.”

Hansen was just four years old when she caught Nick Spataro’s eye. Spataro, then the high school softball coach at Liverpool, watched as his son played on the same Little League team as Hansen’s older brother, Jay Josef. Hansen attended the games, running around, practicing with Prichard.

“‘That girl is going to play for me one day,’” Spataro remembered saying of Hansen. “She was that good already.”

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In elementary school, from third to sixth grade, Hansen began her afterschool walk down Wetzel Road in Liverpool, where Prichard often greeted her with a bucket of balls, a bat and a glove in his hands.

She worked with Prichard almost every day to improve her skills on the baseball field directly across the street from the high school. The crossing guard and other students would frequently stop to watch her, Hansen quipped.

She continuously “played up” on the boys’ baseball teams. At 10, Hansen was invited to play in the major division, where she battled 11 and 12-year-old boys. When one boy from an opposing team made fun of Hansen for being a girl, Renee Hansen, Alicia’s mother, recalled her daughter’s teammates stuck up for her.

“‘Yeah, she’s a girl, and she can play better than you,’” Renee recalled a teammate saying.

When Hansen was 12 years old, she hit a homerun at an all-star baseball tournament. Josef told her after the game that it was then he realized Hansen was already better than he was.

She went to Cooperstown All Star Village, an annual tournament with dozens of teams from across the east coast. Hansen was the only girl at the tournament, which drew lots of attention. Initially, she wasn’t allowed to live in the bunks with her male teammates. After some protest, Hansen was allowed to stay with the boys. On the field, she won multiple game balls and hit two homeruns.

“I even asked (Spataro) if he wanted me to move her to softball earlier,” Renee said. “He told me no, ‘Keep her right where she is.’”

After Cooperstown, Spataro was ready for 12-year-old Hansen to finally switch sports. He had kept Hansen in baseball for years to develop her skills, specifically with sliding and diving, but the time had come for her to begin a new athletic endeavor.

Immediately after Hansen’s all-star baseball game on a Wednesday night, Spataro called Renee.

He needed her on his softball team, and her time with baseball had run out. She had spent her entire athletic career on the baseball diamond, a similar, yet mechanically-different challenge. The following night, Hansen walked out onto the softball field for the first time.

“You don’t really see any girls playing Major League Baseball,” Hansen said. “I’m sure maybe one day it can happen, but as of now the statistics aren’t going to be in my favor.”

Initially, she struggled with timing. While she had an edge playing at a higher competitive level with the boys, she said, trying to hit the ball out of a completely different release point proved challenging.

Some of the rules and mechanisms were different, too. During one game, with a runner on second, Hansen fielded the ball at shortstop. In baseball, the shortstop will often look off the runner at second, then throw to first, Spataro said.

Hansen did exactly that. Except in softball, runners are taught to go on contact because of the shorter distance between bases. After hesitating, Hansen’s throw was too late to get either runner, and both were safe.

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To keep her athleticism, Hansen spent four nights a week at CNY Speed Training, even during the season. She did agility and speed drills with Frank Rey and Dennis Dewane, two trainers, to help her transition to baseball.

“She didn’t like the strength training as much as the cardiovascular training,” Spataro said. “But when I see her now, she always jokes that she wishes she had done more of the strength workouts.”

Less than two years after switching to softball, Hansen started at shortstop as an eighth-grader at Liverpool. Former SU player Sydney O’Hara was then a player for frequent-competitor Cicero-North Syracuse High School, and the two’s rivalry began. Hansen ended multiple of O’Hara’s no-hit bids in her time at Liverpool.

“She was always the Liverpool player I feared because she was the only one who had a good chance of getting a hit off of me,” O’Hara said.

When C-NS beat Liverpool in the sectional final during O’Hara’s senior year, O’Hara consoled Hansen, who cried on the field for almost 10 minutes.

During O’Hara’s freshman year at SU, she gave Hansen campus tours and helped introduce her to the program that Hansen had longed to play for. At that time, SU wasn’t even recruiting her, yet.

Hansen had been to every camp she could go to since she was young. Eventually, during the winter of her junior year, then-head coach Leigh Ross offered. She accepted before leaving Manley Field House.

“I didn’t even apply anywhere else,” Hansen said. “My heart was set on Syracuse, and this was the only place I wanted to go.”

Despite playing in tournaments across the country for TC Tremors, her club softball team, and receiving attention from multiple Division I schools, Hansen only wanted and needed one offer to make her college decision.

In the first game of her softball career at SU, a fall ball game, Hansen broke her left wrist tripping over first base while running out a ground ball. It was the first time she had ever broken a bone. And while she couldn’t hit regularly or play the field, she continued to workout.

She fielded balls with her cast, improved her throwing, lifted with her right arm only and practiced swinging with only one hand. She missed the entire fall season, but when spring came around, Hansen had earned her role as starting second basemen.

When she took the field for the first time at SU Softball Stadium, Hansen was firmly entrenched in a sport she never dreamed to play. But, she was at her dream school, playing in front of Prichard, who made it all possible.