Softball Player of the Year: Aragon’s Olivia DiNardo

DiNardo’s excellence goes way beyond the numbers though. She has an esteemed place in Aragon history in several respects. Her impact was immediate in 2019, as a freshman, when she helped the Lady Dons to the Central Coast Section Division I championship, the first CCS crown in program history.

“As a player, overall, I’d like to think — not that me and Megan … helped put Aragon on the map — but I’d like to say that team kind of changed the face of Aragon,” DiNardo said.

This year came another first, as Aragon qualified for the inaugural California Interscholastic Federation Northern California playoffs, and even played host in the Division II tournament. And away from the varsity diamond, DiNardo and Grant were the core players last season when their Warrior Academy travel softball team — in the organization’s last year playing under the West Bay Warriors banner — closed out the summer of 2021 with the USA Softball Alliance Fastpitch Championship Series 16U Gold national championship.

The hits just keep coming, so to speak, for DiNardo. The sweet-swinging left-handed slugger’s legacy can be summed up in one word — gamer.

But if a more elaborate description is necessary, then call her the Daily Journal Softball Player of the Year.

“Olivia and Megan, they bring a sense of excellence to this field and these other girls have got to live up to that,” Aragon head coach Liz Roscoe said. “When I started and coached this year, I had to find coaches that coached softball. I couldn’t just get coaches to help me — they had to be coaches — because these girls command respect. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.”

DiNardo repaid Roscoe’s respect with extraordinary versatility. A natural catcher who is committed to play behind the plate in the Pac-12 Conference next season at University of Arizona, DiNardo moved around the diamond as a senior to preserve her knees. She stepped into third base like a natural, while also taking reps at first base and the outfield.

“I think she’s just an athlete,” Grant said. “She can do anything she literally puts her mind to. So, it doesn’t matter where she plays, she’s just going to excel as much as she can.”

Yet at the start of her senior year, with DiNardo’s feel for the game as a catcher being so natural, she was offered the chance to call pitches from the third base position. It was right then and there DiNardo’s no-nonsense sense of humor — a wry and sharp wit that tends to square up situations the same way her mighty bat squares up fastballs — made its presence known.

“I was like: ‘No, that’s ridiculous,’” DiNardo said. “I’m not taking that out of whoever’s catching’s hands.”

Instead, DiNardo served as a guru to Aragon sophomore catcher Caroline Harger, who began paving the way to the future of Dons softball with a duo of left-handed pitchers who are set to return next season, sophomore Rae D’Amato and junior Brooke Tran.

“I think she did great,” DiNardo said. “I think she called a lot of really good ballgames. … I think she matured in a lot of good ways, and I think she is a really good catcher.”

If DiNardo is a good teacher, it might just be because she’s had plenty of great teachers along the way. At Aragon, she’s played under three coaches in four years — Roscoe, Gustavo Garrard and Roger Miller. And her two main coaches at Warrior Academy, Ray McDonald and daughter Kelly McDonald, are like family to her.

In fact, during the lost COVID season of 2020, when DiNardo was making her decision between the final two colleges she was choosing between, it was Ray and Kelly McDonald who accompanied her on an unofficial tour of the campus at University of Arkansas.

Ultimately, it was the next likely mentor in a long line of softball aficionados that drew DiNardo to University of Arizona, in new Wildcats head coach Caitlin Lowe, a four-time All-American and former Olympian. Lowe recruited DiNardo when she was serving as associate head coach under Mike Candrea, who announced his retirement after Arizona’s trip to the Women’s College World Series in 2021.

“We have the same goals,” DiNardo said of Lowe. “And I like how she controlled the game both sides of the ball. On the field she’s a killer and off the field she is the nicest person.”

A killer on the field, nicest person off the field — that sounds quite familiar. Maybe it’s because it describes DiNardo to a T.

Well, that and consistency.

In four years at Aragon, her numbers did not waver. A career .634 hitter, she batted .557 with nine home runs as a freshman; .764 with eight home runs as a junior; and .606 with nine homers as a senior. Her sophomore year was cut short by the pandemic, but through three games she still hit .857 (6 for 7) with two home runs.

“Yes, overall, I felt consistent,” DiNardo said. “That was my goal, to stay consistent.”

Not that the otherworldly softball wunderkind is immune to pressure. Heading into her junior season, DiNardo was dealing with several unique issues.

Near the end of her sophomore year, DiNardo was in a scary car accident. She was riding in the backseat when the car she was in spun out on the freeway and hit the center divide. No one in the car was seriously injured but the crash had a profound effect on her future academics — albeit in a good way — as prior to the crash, DiNardo had turned down the chance to attend middle college at College of San Mateo, meaning she’d no longer attend classes at Aragon. In the wake of the crash, she had a change of heart and earned a late enrollment in the middle college program. The last class she ever attended at Aragon came prior to the pandemic in March 2020.

When the new school schedule was causing DiNardo stress heading into her junior season, she came up with a simple remedy. She tore off a piece of athletic tape, wrote down the words “consistency and approach” and stuck it to the back of her cellphone. The motto helped her refine that killer attitude at the plate.

“If I do bad, so what; if I do great, so what?” DiNardo said. “I was just trying to make the most of it. And that was my goal.”