Over the last five years, the only team Aleshia Ocasio has played with for an entire summer is the Puerto Rican national team.
Ocasio is entering her eighth year in professional softball, but most of those years were with Athletes Unlimited’s individualized scoring system, in which teams change weekly. She won the individual championship title in 2021 and finished third last year. Now, at age 28, she will finally get the chance to wear the same uniform for the next two months.
The Blaze selected Ocasio fifth overall in the inaugural Athletes Unlimited Softball League Draft in January, and she is ready to focus on helping her team win rather than trying to move up the individual leaderboard.
“I’m excited to play on one team throughout the whole summer,” Ocasio said. “We’re able to build a culture and then foster an environment that we built. We’re getting to know each other and we’re able to play off our relationships off the field and translate it on the field.”
Ocasio and the Blaze open the 24-game season with a three-game series against the Volts that begins Saturday in Wichita, Kan. Led by general manager Dana Sorenson and head coach Alisa Goler, the Blaze prioritized speed, physicality, and aggressiveness in building their position player group.
Outfielder Aliyah Andrews will be a big part of the Blaze’s ability to put pressure on defenses. In four years with Athletes Unlimited, the former LSU star has hit .333 and was frequently among the league’s leaders in stolen bases. Another former LSU outfielder, Ciara Briggs, will also be a threat on the basepaths, as will veteran infielder Aubrey Leach.
Kayla Kowalik, an assistant coach at Texas Tech, will bring even more speed to the Blaze once she joins the team following the Women’s College World Series finals between the Red Raiders and Texas.
“We are insanely fast and athletic,” said Goler, the head coach at Western Illinois and a three-time All-American as a player at Georgia. “We have been talking about what our DNA looks like as a group and what we need to do to be successful, but this is a team that is going to be under the radar and is going to catch a lot of people off guard.”
That’s not to say the Blaze won’t hit for power. Baylee Klingler has impressed the coaches in practice, Danielle Gibson Whorton is back after giving birth to her first child last November, and rookie Ana Gold is Duke’s all-time home run leader.
“It’s going to be a collective with everyone,” Gold said. “It’s not just going to be riding on one person’s back the whole season. It’s going to be someone new every day. It’s been really cool to see everyone at practice competing and having success, so I’m excited.”
The pitching staff is also a mix of youth and experience. Ocasio and left-hander Keilani Ricketts, who both won a national championship in college at Florida and Oklahoma, respectively, are the veterans, while rookie Emma Lemley is fresh off a stellar collegiate career at Virginia Tech.
Hope Trautwein-Valdespino, another former national champion with the Sooners, and Brooke McCubbin, a rookie out of Clemson, will start the summer with the Blaze, while Alana Vawter and Carley Hoover finish the first half of their season in the Japan Diamond Softball League. Those pitchers will be backed by an excellent defense that includes Andrews and Kalei Harding in the outfield and former AU Defensive Player of the Year Anissa Urtez in the middle infield.
“(Sorenson) is really big on wanting the pitchers to know exactly what their roles are going to be,” Goler said. “They’re trying to get used to what they’re going to be asked, matchup-wise, to do because it’s a little different mindset for them. Defensively, we have people moving all over, but I would put our defense against anyone’s in the league.”
In contrast to the Blaze, the Volts are one of the AUSL’s most powerful lineups, featuring the likes of Amanda Lorenz, Sierra Romero, Jessi Warren and Tiare Jennings. The Blaze’s pitchers will have to keep the ball in the park as much as possible, and the bats will have to keep pace against Rachel Garcia, Peyton Gottshall and the rest of the Volts’ staff.
“They’re not going to beat us with speed, that’s for sure,” Goler said. “They’re going to put the ball in play. That’s what that team does. We just need to be understanding that we may give up a couple runs, but we can still manufacture some runs ourselves.”
Benjamin Rosenberg is the Blaze beat reporter for the AUSL this season. He has more than seven years of experience covering college, professional and high school softball, and graduated with a degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 2021.
