From baseball to javelin: N.S. girl, 17, breaks barriers and records

A 17-year-old from Waverley, N.S., may be the best female baseball player ever to come out of the Maritimes.

The Team Canada star can chuck a fastball almost 80 miles per hour, but her U.S. college scholarship is for throwing a different object altogether.

Julia Konigshofer turned 17 less than a week ago, but she’s already in a league of her own.

Growing up in London, Ontario, she tried numerous sports – but the track of the bat was calling her name.

“When I was nine-years-old, I visited my grandparents in Florida and we went to a spring training game,” Konigshofer tells CTV Atlantic. “And I looked at my parents, and I was like, ‘I want to do what the Blue Jays are doing.’”

Being of a different gender than her favourite Jays never deterred her. In fact, it’s only motivated her.

“That’s kind of my whole story, being the only girl on the team most of my career coming up,” Konigshofer said.

In 2021, she played on the Kentville AAA under 15 boys team. But as girl’s baseball has grown in Canada, so have her opportunities.

This past summer, Konigshofer was the youngest player on Team Canada, pitching two innings against a powerful American women’s team, giving up only one run.

“If she’s playing on a boys team, a girls team, on the national level or a club level, she is there, she’s a leader, she’s a captain,” said pitching coach Cory Boutilier.

As Nova Scotia’s female player of the year for 2022, she Konigshofer also played the provincial girl’s under-16s, coached by her dad, Mike, Nova Scotia’s coach of the year for 2022.

“Our regime was tough,” Mike said. “So a lot of people are like, ‘oh my goodness, she’s training 30 hours a week, that’s crazy! That’s not what an 11 or 12-year-old should do,’ but she loved it.”

While softball is an NCAA sport in the United States, baseball is not. So Konigshofer has accepted a scholarship to the University of Memphis for throwing a completely different object – a javelin. She’s also the Canadian under-18 champion in that sport.

“They’re two completely different throws,” she explained. “Baseball is more of a stationary throw with my windup, and javelin, I get a whole 30 metre runway to run up.”