Why baseball pioneer Olivia Pichardo picked Cal — and softball — after graduating from Brown

When Olivia Pichardo was deciding where to begin her softball career, Cal was quickly on her radar. After four years of baseball with Brown, she knew getting a strong master’s degree mattered, and she needed a coach who would believe in her as she took up a new sport.

Steve Singleton, Cal’s new softball coach, had just seen her name in the transfer portal when he noticed she had sent him a direct message. She wanted to join the Bears, and she wanted to work with a coach who had operated in both baseball and softball.

“I was drawn to their confidence in me,” Pichardo told the Bay Area News Group. “I’m an extremely stubborn person… I always played with the guys, and I feel like maybe it made me feel special, like in some kind of way that I knew that there weren’t many other girls playing baseball on guys’ teams, and I happened to be really good at it.

“Now, I want to be the best softball player I can be, and Cal thinks I can be.”

For a few minutes, Singleton thought about getting back to her later. But after several coaching friends reached out and he watched her baseball tape, he asked Pichardo to talk.

They both thought there was a chance to build something great at Berkeley.

“I watched her video and I was blown away,” Singleton told the Bay Area News Group. “I realized, this is not a background issue, this is a player I have to prioritize right now.”

Pichardo, coming off a two-home run game for the U.S. women’s national baseball team in a 22-2 win over Korea in the World Cup on Wednesday, will be the centerpiece of a rebuilt Cal softball program next year.

Singleton is entering his first year as the head coach after six years as an assistant with Texas, including helping the Longhorns to three consecutive Women’s College World Series appearances. In addition to their new coach, the Bears will have a new, renovated home field and seven transfers added to the roster.

No name is bigger than Pichardo, though, who at age 22 will be playing softball for the first time in her life after graduating from Brown University.

“I was strongly opposed to playing softball in high school. I wanted to go to a high academic school and play baseball, no matter what division or level it was,” she said. “In hindsight, that was a crazy thing for me to do, to immediately not even think about it.”

The Queens, New York native played baseball throughout her childhood as the only girl on almost all of her teams. When she began being scouted by USA Baseball, she realized there might be a future in the sport beyond being the only girl on her youth teams.

After playing varsity baseball at Jackson Heights’ Garden School, Pichardo got offers to play Division I softball, including from some SEC schools. Instead, she was admitted to Brown and was determined to walk onto the baseball team.

As an Ivy League trailblazer, she garnered national attention for small feats, including her pinch-hit debut in 2023, which broke the Division I gender barrier, and her first appearance on the mound this spring as a senior, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

“I literally threw two pitches, got a ground out to end it, and it made like ESPN,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it to get very much attention at all, but I was like, all right, sure, I’m just gonna go with it.”

After graduating with a degree in business economics, Pichardo learned that NCAA athletes can compete in a different sport after exhausting their initial four years of eligibility. Instead of trying to join the pro baseball ranks this August as the Women’s Pro Baseball League starts up, she decided to head west.

She tagged along for batting practice on the Brown softball diamond late this spring with Maggie Foxx, a USA Baseball teammate and Brown softball player, when she realized she could make the transition for one year.

“I had never hit a BP home run, and I hit so many, so I was immediately drawn to it,” Pichardo said. “And then I thought, well, why not give this a real shot?”

Cal was the first team to respond to Pichardo once she entered the transfer portal in April.

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“(Singleton) told me how much he believed my skills could translate to softball,” Pichardo said. “I was immediately drawn to that confidence in me.”

Pichardo, who originally joined the USA Baseball girls development pipeline at age 14, has competed with the USWNT for the past four years after participating in the 2017 MLB girls baseball Trailblazer Series and MLB GRIT, a girls baseball showcase event.

Singleton projects her as a top-of-the-order hitter who will likely spend most of her time with the Bears in the outfield.

“She is very explosive, very strong, very fast,” Singleton said. “(Baseball) is a crowd that she’s had to keep up with for the past eight years in college and high school. She’s had to keep up with a male wolf pack essentially…. She’s swung a minus-3 bat for the last eight years. That a 34-inch bat would be a 31-ounce bat. In our game, the heaviest bat was 26, so I think she can dominate.”

Pichardo hopes that a year from now, she is preparing for a chance to make a team in the upstart WPBL. The new league opens its inaugural six-week season in Springfield, Illinois, at the beginning of August, and she will have her eye on it following the World Cup.

Pichardo has already navigated unique circumstances as the only woman to compete at the Division I level, dealing with the attention that comes with that history in addition to an Ivy League courseload.

So what’s picking up an entirely different sport with just one offseason of notice for a Cal team looking to start competing on the national scene?

“I just think, why not give it a try?” she said.