A girl who wanted to play baseball, Emily Varela is Washington Prep’s ‘golden ticket’

Hope is hard to come by, out here, where weeds twist up from the dirt mound and the coach carries not a bucket but a tiny pail of usable baseballs.

Washington Prep’s baseball team has the day off Thursday afternoon, and new head coach Erik Cortez has assembled but a handful of frolicking players for a pseudo-practice. To give his pitchers some live-batter simulation, he steps into the box, urging a kid on the mound to throw the ball over the plate. It does not happen. The pitcher, scared of hitting his coach, lobs offering after offering into the dirt into the opposite batter’s box.

Elsewhere, parent Catalina Varela, who’s stopped by after work, calls to a kid shagging balls on first base. On, because he is quite literally standing on first base, and Varela motions for him to move over, position himself off of the base.

Hope is hard to come by, because this is life at the bottom. For the last two decades, there might not be a worse baseball team in the entire City Section. At Washington Prep, where about a quarter of the community in surrounding Westmont lives in poverty, baseball has exactly one non-forfeit win since the 2014 season. Their “coaches,” before Cortez was hired as a P.E. teacher, have been a rotating array of volunteers and Spanish instructors, the team using the simplest of lineups last year: The first baseman hit first, second baseman second, and so on.

“It was just, like, a catastrophe,” said sophomore Kainoa Kaiwi.

Yet freshman Emily Varela, the next pitcher who takes the mound on Thursday, is not afraid of catastrophe. She is afraid of nothing, in fact: not a boy, not crowds telling her she should go back to softball. Varela is a girl playing baseball. She also has the best arm at Washington Prep.

So to Cortez, to Washington Prep athletic director Ahmad Mallard, to a program that’s experienced a lack of resources and motivation for decades, Varela is more than a talent.

“She’s the golden ticket,” Mallard said.

Since Varela raised her grades enough to be eligible to play a few weeks ago, she’s struck out double-digit hitters in three games, and the program has taken on a new energy.

She grew up playing baseball at Jesse Owens Park in South L.A. because of her late grandpa, Heriberto, who played in an adult league in Los Angeles. She could’ve pivoted in high school to softball, where she would’ve had a better chance at a college scholarship. But Varela wanted to play baseball, wearing her grandpa’s cleats in his memory when she plays.

“It was shocking,” Kaiwi said. “Usually, people didn’t want to play. So when she showed us how determined she was to play, it was like, ‘Oh.’ It brings everybody up.”

The spark started the first day Cortez invited Varela, who’d heard the team needed a catcher, up to the mound to pitch against the team in practice.

“He saw none of the boys could hit a ball when I was pitching,” Varela grinned.

“She struck most of us out,” Kaiwi said, “and we’re like, ‘Dang.’”

Mallard did a double-take when he saw a girl had signed up for the baseball team. But he, and so many others, were made believers on April 10 when Varela whiffed 10 in a 9-6 win over Crenshaw.

“My goal is to maybe just highlight her, and show the success that we’re having with her,” Mallard said. “And maybe she can bring girls to the team, and bring more boys to the team, and maybe even help with softball.”

It’s already working. Two of Varela’s friends, who Cortez said knew nothing about baseball but help with scorekeeping and other tasks, have officially been added to the roster.

And now, Varela’s teammates beg Cortez to pitch her every game.

“And I love that,” Cortez said, “because other than that, the kids will not be motivated. We would keep on losing over and over. [We] wouldn’t have some sort of hope on our team.

“Which, is Emily, at this point.”