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Taylor Brandt, a 2019 Vintage High graduate who played for Napa High as a freshman, led the Eastern Nazarene College softball team with 7 home runs this past spring.
Eastern Nazarene College's Taylor Brandt takes a swing during the season-opening PFX Spring Games in March in Clermont, Fla.
Vintage High graduate Taylor Brandt warms up in left field during an Eastern Nazarene College home game at Mitchell-McCoy Field in Quincy, Mass.
It was a win-win for Taylor Brandt when the Golden State Warriors faced the Boston Celtics in this year’s NBA Finals.
“Either way I was winning because it was either my home team or my home team,” said the 2019 Vintage High graduate.
Brandt has considered the Boston suburb of Quincy, Massachusetts as much her hometown as Napa since she began playing NCAA Division III softball there for Eastern Nazarene College in 2020.
“New York City is like three hours away,” she said, “and Washington DC is six hours away, like driving to L.A. for the weekend.”
She said students can attend any professional sports game for $9, be it the NHL’s Boston Bruins, the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots, or the Celtics.
“I’ve fallen in love with hockey,” she said. “The sports culture just in Boston is amazing. I grew up a Red Sox fan, so getting to go to games all the time is amazing.”
Brandt is going into her senior year at ENC, where as a left fielder she made the National Fastpitch Coaches' Association All-Region Second Team this past spring after landing a Third Team spot as a sophomore.
She co-led the Lions with 7 home runs and finished second on the team with a .430 batting average, 15 doubles, 36 runs scored, and a .704 slugging percentage. Her 30 RBI were fourth-most on the team.
“I don’t really consider myself a home run hitter. I was really surprised that I hit as many as I did,” Brandt said. “I really just focus on hitting on the best part of the bat as hard as I can, so whatever happens happens.”
She also made the All-New England Collegiate Conference team after ENC finished 8-4 in the NECC and 22-22 overall. The top-seeded Lions fell to No. 3 seed Lesley, 4-3 and 7-6, in the best-of-three NECC Tournament championship series.
She was selected as the NECC Player of the Week for March 7-11 after getting 12 hits, 4 RBI and 3 runs scored in seven games at the PFX Spring Games in Florida. She batted .500 on the week with a slugging percentage of .729. It was a nice consolation for a team that went 0-7 that week and 2-8 overall in Florida to start the season.
As a freshman at Napa High, Brandt was not only the Grizzlies’ pitching ace with a 10-5 record but led them at the plate with 4 home runs, 22 RBI and 6 doubles while hitting .386, second-best on the team.
After playing travel softball during her sophomore year, missing Napa High’s run to its first Sac-Joaquin Section softball title, she visited the Boston area with her mom, Crystal, and fell in love with it.
She transferred to Vintage for her junior season and led the Crushers with a .619 batting average, 26 hits, six doubles, two triples, a .652 on-base percentage and a .928 slugging clip while driving in 12 runs and scoring 12. Vintage went just 4-16 overall and 4-11 in the Monticello Empire League under first-year coach Cat Guidry, but seven of its nine underclassmen came back when Robert Poppe took the helm in 2019. Under Poppe and his staff, the Crushers finished in a three-way tie for second place in the new Vine Valley Athletic League with an 8-4 record. They went 14-7 overall after dropping a 5-2 nailbiter at Carondelet-Concord in the first round of the North Coast Section Division 1 playoffs.
Brandt hit .552 with a .630 on-base percentage, 22 RBIs, two home runs, 12 walks, and team highs of 10 doubles, 24 runs scored and 37 hits.
Her first team at ENC was off to a 7-5 start when that 2020 season was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But ENC felt like home from the start in part because Lions head coach Dani Bishop had grown up in Southern California. Having played for UC Riverside, she recruited heavily in the Golden State. The Lions’ only two all-region selections other than Brandt last season were from Southern California, and a member of the Carondelet team that beat Vintage in its 2019 playoff opener, Alex Schwenger, has been one of Brandt’s ENC teammates ever since.
“Alex and I actually played together in travel ball when we were 10 years old,” Brandt said. “We’ve known each other forever.”
Even American Canyon’s Adriana Montuya transferred to ENC for softball in 2020 from Solano Community College, but left the team after that truncated season.
The 6-foot Brandt, who also played volleyball in high school, is 3 inches taller than anyone else on the team.
“It helps with having long legs,” she said. “I’m able to cover ground, which is definitely really nice for an outfielder.”
It helped her make a diving catch during the last game of the Lions’ 2021 season, a loss at the NCAA Tournament Regional in Marshall, Texas.
“It was such a great experience getting to go through all of that because the NCAA was amazing,” she recalled. “They paid for our food, transportation and hotel rooms, and we got a private, chartered plane for the whole trip.”
Brandt, who is majoring in sports management and business administration, has been coming back to Napa during the winter and summer breaks. She has been working at a Yountville winery this summer. But when she goes back to Boston near the end of the month, it will be to become a permanent resident of Massachusetts.
“I want to go to law school, so I’m hoping to fully live out there after I graduate in the spring,” she said. “Pretty much every law school in Boston is outstanding. I would love to be able to write and negotiate contracts for professional teams.”
Her classes are small at ENC due in part to the fact the school is known more for education majors.
“If you want to be a teacher, it’s an amazing school to go to,” Brandt said. “(Quincy) has the highest-paying district for all teachers in the United States. Most of my teammates are education majors.”
Despite her teammates coming from California, New York, Connecticut, Idaho, Massachusetts, Hawaii and New Jersey, they were able to develop good team chemistry.
“We learn a lot from each other, and that’s kind of the beauty of having such different backgrounds and being from such different places. You never run out of things to talk about,” Brandt said. “I went with one of my teammates to her house for the weekend in upstate New York and I was amazed that no houses had fences. You can just buy any old trash bin and put it on the side of the street and they pick it up, and high school kids ride school buses. Instead of saying something is ‘hella’ good, they said it’s ‘wicked’ good.
“One of my roommates has this super-thick Boston Italian accent, so she’s like ‘Pahk the cah’ and ‘it’s in the drawah in ya bedrum.’ It’s a cool little accent, but I haven’t brought it home. Hopefully I don’t catch it, because I like talking the way that I do.”
She said she became a better conversationalist when she attended the five-day NCAA Career in Sports Forum at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis earlier this summer. She said every NCAA Division I, II or III school in the country can nominate five student-athletes to attend the forum. That pool of as many as 10,000 applicants is slashed down to 200 attendees.
“I learned so much and definitely came out a little bit different because of that experience,” she said. “We got to meet the heads of the NCAA and talk to some of the most important people who run our athletics. We’re all part of a giant group following each other on LinkedIn. I was expecting there to be mostly males because sports is such a male-dominated field, but there were so many women there. I became friends with a girl who was an equestrian in Texas.”
Going from playing 12 games in 2020 to 31 in 2021 was a big jump, but playing 44 this year was pretty taxing.
“By the time we were past that 40-game mark, we were all just completely exhausted,” Brandt said. “Our pitcher had been pitching on a broken finger the entire season; she broke it in like our sixth game. We were all just mentally and physically drained. We had a large group of juniors, and that happens to be the hardest year of school whether you’re in high school or in college and we had just finished finals. I think next year is definitely going to be a lot better because we’ve experienced it now.
“Whenever you get a team of girls, there always seems to be drama and bickering — someone doesn’t like someone — but we honestly all love each other so much and we’re so close. Just on our floor of the building, there are eight softball players living within 15 feet of each other. We really bounce off of each other, so when somebody isn’t positive, we focus on them, loving them and making sure they’re still enjoying themselves and really getting to watch each other grow.”
Bishop left the helm after the 2021 season and was replaced as head coach by New York native Claire Roll.
“Most of us are from California and grew up playing the game a little bit differently and (Roll’s) philosophy on the game and the way she does things and runs certain plays is different,” Brandt said. “You shift and shade and do all of these things whereas (in California) you played your position as hard and as fast as you could.”
Brandt said one of her friends who also transferred from Napa to Vintage and ended up playing for the University of Pittsburgh, Ashlee Sills, helped teach her how to deal with cold weather, along with Napa High product Katie O’Donnell, who played for the University of Chicago.
“I got a parka and warm comforter, but you can’t prepare for how it’s actually going to feel once you get there,” Brandt said. “I’m still getting used to it. There are days when I’m like, wow, it’s cold and I’m probably not leaving my bedroom. Me and a couple of teammates actually got hypothermia one day because we weren’t prepared for how cold it ended up being and we got back to campus and our athletic trainers were trying to warm us back up. We had like heating pads all over our bodies and they’re taking our temperature every three minutes.
“If we want to go to the snow, we go to Tahoe. No one says ‘go to the snow’ out there because it’s there when you walk out your front door. We go to a golf course around the corner and go sledding. Pretty much the first snow of every year, we (California players) all put on our snow gear and puffy jackets and play in the snow like little kids.”
Brandt said being a student-athlete helps her keep in shape and good at time management.
“But it also is extremely straining,” she said. “People don’t realize how much work actually goes into it. You’re waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning to work out, going straight from the workout to class, going from class to your next practice, going from practice to another class. You literally forget to eat sometimes, just because you’re running back and forth, so you pray you have a Granola bar in your backpack or coach has snacks in their office. It’s a lot, especially when you’re in season and you have classes and essays to write and deadlines to make and tests to take and tests that you’re missing and you’re not getting back on campus until midnight and now your homework is going to be late. It’s definitely a lot to juggle and you have to learn to deal with everything.
“But I think it’s going to help prepare me for the future because I know how to manage my time so well. When I was in high school, I sacrificed a lot to be in the position I’m in now. I went to one homecoming dance and one prom, so I didn’t get to have that full high school experience. I just try to remember all the work that I put in beforehand, all that time and effort and blood, sweat and tears, to be where I am now.”
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Andy Wilcox is a sportswriter-photographer for the Napa Valley Register. He's had similar roles in Walnut Creek, Grass Valley, Auburn, Tracy and Patterson. He grew up in Ohio. His wife, Laura, is a pastry chef. He also enjoys playing guitar and piano.
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Taylor Brandt, a 2019 Vintage High graduate who played for Napa High as a freshman, led the Eastern Nazarene College softball team with 7 home runs this past spring.
Eastern Nazarene College's Taylor Brandt takes a swing during the season-opening PFX Spring Games in March in Clermont, Fla.
Vintage High graduate Taylor Brandt warms up in left field during an Eastern Nazarene College home game at Mitchell-McCoy Field in Quincy, Mass.
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