Britt Vonk in 2008
(Photo by Marco Stoovelaar) |
DUTCH OLYMPIAN IN U.S. SPOTLIGHT
2011-06-01
In the Olympic Softball competition that took place in Beijing close to three years ago, the roster for the Netherlands included then-17-year old Britt Vonk. As profiled by ESPN W, she is now competing for a major championship - in the United States!
(The following is reprinted with permission from ESPN)
If California freshman shortstop Britt Vonk has anything to say about
it, the Women's College World Series could soon come considerably
closer to living up to the often-under-represented third word in its
name.
Global is about the only way to describe a route to Oklahoma City that stretches from Amsterdam to Beijing and the Bay Area.
The Pac-10 is fond of touting itself as the best softball conference in the country, a reputation only bolstered by four member schools combining to win the past five national championships. In all, the league owns 22 NCAA titles, suggesting that like so many other crops dependent on dirt, grass and the vagaries of weather for success, softball found fertile footing in the West and boomed. The region shares its bounty -- rare is the roster in Division I that doesn't include at least a player or two from Arizona or California. But for Pac-10 teams, it means there is little need to look beyond their own borders -- just 17 players currently listed on the league's eight rosters are from states not home to a member school, including just eight players from map points east of the Mississippi River.
The University of California is no exception. From a roster of 19 players plying their trade in Berkeley this season, 17 come from California, while another player's Nevada hometown is about 20 miles east of the state line. But as the Bears look to get back to the Women's College World Series for the first time since 2005 and become the first team other than Arizona or UCLA to win multiple national championships since the college pitching distance was set at 43 feet before the 1988 season, success might hinge on a player who has twice trekked halfway around the globe to compete against the best it has to offer.
Now in her first college season half a world away from her hometown of Enschede, a city about 100 miles east of Amsterdam, Vonk was just 17 when she became the youngest member of the Dutch national team that competed in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. And just as she wasted little time making an impression on the international stage, going from a surprise inclusion on the Dutch team to the leadoff batter when the team took the field for its first game of the tournament in China, she didn't waste any time establishing herself as a potential All-American, so to speak.
Read the rest of the article here.
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