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Jenny Topping’s athletic career at Cal State Fullerton was nothing short of dazzling. Playing for the women’s softball team from 2001 through 2003, the superb hitter and tenacious team leader was picked as her conference’s Player of the Year – as well as a national All-American – each of those three years.
To top everything off, Topping was selected as a member of the 2004 U.S. Olympic softball team. But ironically, it was a period of frustration on the softball field that led to one of her most valuable lessons at CSUF. In her junior year, the Whittier native was going through a slump, the kind of off period that every talented athlete faces at some point or another. Feeling down and discouraged, she walked into head coach Michelle Gromacki’s office one day for a heartto- heart.
“I was talking to Michelle and she asked me, ‘What do you want people to say about you after you die?’ ” Topping recalls. “I thought about it and said, ‘Well, I guess that I was a good person – a thoughtful person who cared about others.’
“She said to me, ‘You notice that not once in there did you say you wanted to be remembered for your batting average?’ That was a pivotal moment for me. It really helped me put things into perspective.” The idea that being a good person matters much more than being a first-rate ballplayer is one that Topping touches on several times during a recent interview on the CSUF campus. Clearly, this is a woman who understands priorities as well as she does pitchers, which is saying a lot, given that the 27-year-old catcher has worked with some of the greatest softball hurlers in U.S. history, including Lisa Fernandez, Jenny Finch, Cat Osterman and Monica Abbott.
Topping may perform on the world stage once more this summer. She returns to Team U.S.A. as an alternate player for the 2008 Games in Beijing. Her fellow U.S. team members are aiming to win a fourth straight gold medal – although they’ll be hard-pressed to dominate as resoundingly as they did in the Athens Games. Try to digest this eye-popping figure: In the nine games the softball team played in Athens, the U.S. won by a combined score of 51 to 1.
Topping thrived under the high-pressure glare of Olympic competition. Playing back-up to starting catcher Stacey Nuveman, the former Titan standout went to bat six times and four of those times she got hits – a terrific percentage in any league.
“I’ve always loved competition. I’m at my best when someone pushes me against the wall, and it’s either fight or flight,” says Topping, who battled to overcome several major injuries during her college career. “I want to be up at bat with a full count, facing Cat Osterman.”
Laura Berg, the starting center fielder on the U.S. team and a three-time Olympian describes Topping as very tough, both mentally and physically. “She’s the kind of teammate you want up when you need a run hit in. She’s very consistent, and she comes up with big plays. She’s very, very competitive, yet she’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.”
The U.S. women know each other well: Most of the same players on the 2004 squad are back in 2008. In addition, 10 of the 18 originally hail from Southern California, so they grew up playing against each other in youth leagues. “This area is the hotbed for softball,” notes Topping, who began playing the sport when she was nine.
Being on the U.S. team doesn’t mean just playing ballgames in the summer; the group trains and competes nearly year-round. There are international tournaments held annually. The camaraderie and close friendships with her teammates, as well as the chance to travel the world and experience other cultures, have been hugely rewarding, Topping says.
She tells a story about playing in the Pan American Games in Brazil last summer. The ex-Titan and five other teammates were crammed into a small two-bedroom apartment in the athletes’ village. (They don’t live the glamorous life, as do, for example, pro basketball players, decamping in deluxe hotels around the world.) One morning the team had to travel to a 9 a.m. contest, so the women rose in their apartment at 5 a.m. Bleary-eyed, they stumbled to make some coffee and get themselves ready. As the teammates sat around drinking their java, Topping remembers saying to them, “This is the moment we’re going to remember when we think back on these days – all of us drinking coffee at 5 a.m., watching the sun rise in Brazil.”
A sociology major at CSUF and now a Whittier resident, Topping says some of her best memories are of meeting athletes from other countries and learning about their native lands.
It was Rick Topping – Jenny’s father and an excellent athlete himself, good enough to win a football scholarship to USC – who nurtured his daughter’s athletic development when she was young. Topping spent her freshman year at the University of Washington, making quite a splash in Seattle: In that 2000 season, she led the NCAA in home runs (24) and runs batted in (90), and was tapped as a national All-American. However, the 5’6’’ slugger then transferred to CSUF, where, not surprisingly, she made an immediate impact on the softball program.
“Jenny was an extremely talented ballplayer and definitely displayed leadership abilities,” says Gromacki, who just completed her ninth year as head coach of the Titans’ softball team. “Everyone on the team respected her because of her ability and her work ethic.”
Looking back, Topping says she wishes that she had taken greater advantage of the academic opportunities at CSUF. But at that time, Titan softball was everything to her; she immersed herself in learning new skills from her coaches and joining forces with her teammates to win ballgames.
“The team experience was my main focus [in college]. I put all my love and heart into softball.” And she had her heart broken a few times: Each of her three years at CSUF, Topping’s squad lost in the NCAA regional women’s softball tournament – each time to the team that would ultimately win the national championship.
But there was also much to be proud about. Topping guided her teams to three straight league titles, the last one coming courtesy of a 20-1 record, the best winning percentage in the history of the Big West Conference.
In Gromacki, Topping had the perfect teacher: The coach, too, had been a catcher – a brilliant one, for the Titans. Gromacki had caught one of the best softball pitchers ever: Susan LeFebvre-Wyman, whose 100 wins is still the most of any pitcher in CSUF history. The pair led the 1986 Titans to the NCAA softball championship. “Michelle was known for making pitchers better,”
Topping says. “I learned a lot from her.”
Gromacki mentored her young charge in the finer skills of working with pitchers, in helping a hurler achieve both the right mechanics and mind-set. Topping says one reason she loves playing the position of catcher is because you have to be so mentally involved; you always have to be focused and aware of everything that’s happening on the field: where the players are positioned, what tactical strategies are being employed, who is up at bat next, what’s going on with your pitcher’s emotions as well as her ball control. “The pitcher and catcher always have to be in sync,” she says. “That’s what I love about softball and baseball: It’s a much slower game [than other sports], so you have to think things through,” she adds. “There are so many games within the game.”Topping, an unpretentious and sincere young woman, has succeeded beautifully at the sport, and won piles of praise and honors along the way. But considering a conversation she once had with her coach during a difficult time, she’d probably derive the greatest satisfaction from this compliment: “Jenny’s a great person,” Gromacki says. “She’s an ambassador for the sport, because a lot of young girls look up to her.”
The former Titan still heads over to the Fullerton campus to practice and work out whenever she gets a chance. And when she does, she usually tries to stop in and chat with the coaches, whose offices are up in the Cliff and Mary Doubek VIP room at Anderson Family Field. There’s an array of mementos in that room that chronicle the school’s illustrious history of baseball and softball players. Hanging prominently on one wall is a photograph of Topping, showing her steely gaze behind the catcher’s mask.
In December of last year, she was feeling particularly in her element because the U.S. Olympic team set up shop at Anderson Field for a week of training and practice. Topping says she couldn’t have been more excited or proud to have her teammates on “my turf.” “I was in heaven,” she says. “I love it here. It will always be my home.”
