Veronica Alvarez became the first woman to be named the USA Baseball Rod Dedeaux Coach of the Year for her work at the helm of the 2019 Women's National Team. Under her direction, Team USA finished its tournament with a perfect 7-0 record and the program's first gold medal since the Toronto 2015 Pan American Games. The U.S. outscored its opponents 124-20, held a cumulative .500 batting average and hit a record 11 home runs. The team was also named USA Baseball's Team of the Year after its dominating performance last summer.
In addition to making her managerial debut with the Women's National Team in 2019, Alvarez also served as an assistant coach on the 2018 staff and played for Team USA five times in her career as a catcher. Her time with the red, white and blue started in 2008 and every team she participated on medaled in international competition.
Since finishing her playing career in 2016, Alvarez has continued to help grow the next generation of female baseball players as a coach at the Trailblazer Series from 2017-2019 and the Girls Baseball Breakthrough Series Showcase & Development Camp in 2018 and 2019, joining the collaboration between Major League Baseball and USA Baseball to foster the next generation of female baseball players in the United States.
Additionally, Alvarez will serve as a coach with the Oakland Athletics at Major League Baseball Spring Training for the second consecutive year in 2020 and she has previously coached at the USA Baseball Women's National Team Identification Series and the 2019 12U National Open.
USA Baseball (USAB): How are you staying active and sane while we all stay home right now?
Veronica Alvarez (VA): Well I live in Miami - Miami Beach, specifically - so we're definitely outdoors people, which makes it hard to stay inside. But we really love the outdoors so I have done a few paddle boarding trips. Not sure if that's illegal or not (laughs) but social-distancing paddle board trips for fun, and then walking the dog is always a fun adventure for me. I have a great dane and we go on really long walks with him. So that's non-baseball stuff and then I've just been staying busy with lessons and just contining to learn as much as possible.
USAB: Have you developed and new hobbies or tried and new activities?
VA: No, just our walks have gotten longer, that's for sure and just enjoying being outside. But my schedule for the most part feels normal because I'm still working. So, every third day, I'm a firefighter paramedic and in between is kind of setting myself up with the laundry, the housework and things like that. Then with any free time, just being outside if possible to get some fresh air.
USAB: Can you explain the Zoom meetings you and other Women's National Team alums and staff members have been having with MLB scouts and officials over the last couple of weeks?
VA: Yep, with the whole idea to try and make ourselves better, USA Baseball and MLB have hosted a few of them for us. So, it's been any alumni of the Women's National Team or current players or coaches or anything like that and we've been able to hear from scouts. One of the oldest scouts in the game where he had a more old-school mentality (doesn't even use a radar gun when he scouts players, which was fun to hear) - a man with a very strong mustache. I loved hearing his angle on things, it was just great to hear that kind of old-school mentality. And then a second meeting was more new-school, where we saw all the analytics in baseball and how they're able to evaluate players and scout them or just work on current players and improve their skills based on using their analytics and their systems, which was cool to hear.
Being with the A's last year in Spring Training and this year as well, I was able to work with that and see it. I love telling the woman about it because it blows our minds the capabilities of the system. It's such a fun tool to have but it was great to hear so much more that they could do with it. I just got the bare bones on it, I used it for a few hours on catching and analyzing our catchers in the system and how we could work with that, but hearing everything else - that they get to evaluate the speed at which a player accelerates, then based on that, see how many bases he's going to steal - it was fun to see.
USAB: So, you got to see the older and newer mentalities but were there any other favorite takeaways from the people you guys have interacted with via Zoom?
VA: Well it just opens your mind that there's so much out there and that's something fun that we've always known about baseball is you'll never learn everything. But now there's just this whole other world of it where technology is involved. It just opens our minds to learning more and being open to more but still being able to balance it. So, mixing the two is a great tool of having that old-school mentality where we're still using our eyes and our judgment but then using the numbers as well. It's fun to mix the two and see how they can be beneficial to us in the future.
USAB: Let's go back to the beginning, what got you started in baseball to begin with?
VA: I always say I was born to play this; I came out wanting to play. I'm Cuban-American and in our Cuban culture, girls and women aren't really supposed to play sports - or at least they weren't when I was growing up - but I was lucky to have parents that allowed me. One of the first moments was my mom took me to go do ballet or something and she tells the story of I ran away waving my arms and screaming 'no!' and screaming that I wanted to go play baseball so I always loved it (laughs). My brother played, he was a little bit older than me and I was in the stands with him kind of waiting to be put into the game.
USAB: So some of the Women's National Team players adopt baseball at a later point in their lives, so what percentage of women do you think truly play baseball from a young age and kept it with them throughout their lives to build a career out of it like you have?
VA: I actually think [the number is] higher than you think of the woman on the national team that played baseball. The norm - obviously because there's more opportunity in softball - is that you think most of them went to softball. I actually did go to softball, I played softball in college and was lucky enough to come back to baseball and find the game again. But we're a mix of players. We have some that never switched to softball; we have some that played baseball through senior year of high school and switched to softball just for college opportunities and then came back to the sport; and then we have the ones that have played baseball before and were just more baseball-style players and were able to make the adjustment - like Alex Hugo. She's one that never played baseball but if you saw her play softball, you would think she had. So, she's made some great adjustments and been able to [transition to baseball]. But I almost think we have more non-softball players and true baseball players than softball players.
USAB: Besides running away from ballet class, do you have a favorite early baseball memory?
VA: I would say my memory probably comes from the fact that I always wanted to play and I was eager to be involved and it was fun to blow the minds of people who didn't expect me to be good at it from a young age. If was fun to blow people's minds in the sense that I was just the little sister that wanted to play then all of a sudden, I had a heck of an arm and I did it better than the guys that were on my brother's team. So, I think those were my earliest memories, just being involved and then seeing people's appreciation for me based on my appreciation for the game.
USAB: You've been a part of the USA Baseball family for quite a while now. What has USA Baseball meant to you throughout your career, both playing and working your way into coaching?
VA: It's meant a lot. Most women in sport, their collegiate career is the end of their sports career, so I was lucky that I was able to continue playing and had an outlet for it. And then it wasn't just a place to play, it became so much more. My dream as a kid was to be an Olympian and, I'm technically not an Olympian, but I was in a Pan American Games and that's the highest that the sport has gone. I was able to represent the U.S. on that international stage and that was almost a dream come true in a sense. I didn't accomplish it all the way, but I accomplished it at the highest [level] possible for the sport I played. Now, the goal is maybe I'll be an Olympian as a coach one day and help somebody else achieve that dream.
USAB: What would you say is your favorite thing about coaching?
VA: Well I really love helping somebody accomplish a dream. I was that person as a player in just the way I was a supporter of my teammates and I'm there as a coach. I like to help somebody achieve what they're trying to achieve and see the adjustments that they've made and how much better they've gotten through time. I love that, that drives me to do what I do. I love coaching young players because it helps me communicate better the skills that maybe an older person would understand but you have to really simplify it for a young player - you have to use different words, you have to use a different explanation because you're going to have to help them understand it. So, I love coaching young players and that just makes me better for when it's time to coach more developed, more mature players.
USAB: Do you have a favorite Team USA memory? One that sticks out above the rest?
VA: There are a lot. My first year playing, we played in Japan - which is a country that loves baseball, so that was an amazing experience. It was the first time I played for USA, so it was spectacular. And then the second year, I played in 2010 we played in Venezuela, which was another country that absolutely loves baseball but a different country, so it was a different experience. In our game against Venezuela, we had close to 16,000 fans and just to play in front of that crows was incredible. We ended up losing that game because of the crowd and it's still one of my favorite memories - and I hate losing. But it was just a cool place to be and especially experience that with the teammates and the team we had was an incredible one so that was fun.
USAB: What about a coaching memory? Does anything beat winning the gold in 2019?
VA: Well, no and obviously, we want to win and that's the goal, but the team dynamic that we had last year was the dream. It was a family. Everyone was in it for the end goal and everyone made adjustments - really, really good adjustments - and trusted the coaching staff and trusted each other and really performed well on the field. So, I would say my favorite part about last year was the team dynamic.
USAB: What kind of advice would you give to a young athlete that wants to stay active and stay sharp in these less certain times for when baseball does come back?
VA: I'm big on goal setting and writing down your goal and then steps that need to be take to get there. These times are perfect examples that we can kind of get lulled into this zone where we're not working on things or we're not really addressing our goals. So, I'm big on putting it down on paper. What is your goal? And then how am I going to get there? Because we're not going to accomplish this goal in a day or a week or a month, it's going to take some time. But seeing it, I think, is helpful when you don't see the end. Especially right now we don't see the end to this so it would be nice to put something down on paper and how you can accomplish things.
