When Lauren Bay Regula received an email invitation to pitch for the Canadian national team in this month’s WBSC Women’s World Softball Championship, the two-time Olympian quickly ticked off several reasons why that wouldn’t be possible.
Foremost was that the married mother of three and Bath, Ohio, resident turns 35 on Aug. 9 and hadn’t picked up a ball since Beijing.
But after Canada finished third on Sunday and Bay Regula started the bronze medal-clinching victory over the Netherlands on Saturday night, she’s not ruling out more competition.
“I’m not sure. I have not decided. There’s a lot up in the air,” she said Monday by phone. “I’m just happy I made it through one summer. I haven’t really thought about anything else except hanging out with my family.”
Bay Regula and her husband, Dave, a Walsh Jesuit graduate and former kicker at Dartmouth, were headed to a family gathering in Seattle, home of her brother, former major league player Jason Bay. If a discussion of her softball future came up, her dad, brother and husband probably egged on Lauren to continue.
That’s what happened when Canadian coach Mark Smith broached the idea of Bay Regula coming out of retirement a few months ago. Smith knew Lauren and Dave own TrAk Athletics in Fairlawn, so she would be in decent physical shape. (The gym’s name is a combination of their hometowns, as Lauren grew up in Trail, British Columbia.)
But with children ages 6, 5 and 3 at home, Bay Regula would not have taken the leap if not for her husband’s encouragement. She said she was Canada’s oldest player “by a decent amount of years,” and feared she would embarrass him, her father and her brother.
“[Dave] always says — and I’m not very good at this because I’m very Type A — ‘Take a chance and you can figure it out later.’ When I got that initial email about coming back, I was like, ‘I can’t do it because of A, B, C and D,’” Bay Regula said. “I’m trying to get a little better at it.
“Things sometimes seem so big and when you step back and look … After this whole summer, the opportunities [for] my kids, they had a blast at the park, they got special treatment. My husband is joking they won’t want to go to a normal softball game any more because they not going to be allowed to run the bases. That’s basically what I’m going home with. That and a little bit of exhaustion.”
Not only did Bay Regula compete for Canada in the 2004 Olympics in Athens and in 2008 in Beijing, but she also played for the Chicago Bandits and the Philadelphia Force in the National Pro Fastpitch League. She met Regula when she was training for Athens. He became her bullpen catcher, which he repeated this year, using Bay’s outfielder’s glove instead of a mitt and standing in front of a concrete block wall.
But returning to the Canadian team as one of three holdovers from the 2008 Olympics was painful.
“I was pretty sore, I hadn’t thrown for so long,” she said. “I had muscle memory in terms of mechanics, but I didn’t have muscle memory in terms of longevity to throw. I didn’t feel like I was super-old. I could tell I had taken almost a decade off from softball fatigue-wise. I was pleasantly surprised how much my body could bounce back and recover after eight years off.”
But juggling the demands of softball, three children and a business was also stressful and that didn’t lessen until she joined the team in June. Training included a week in California, followed by 10 days in Japan, a trip back to California, then Oklahoma before heading to British Columbia. The championship, won by the U.S. over then-No. 1 Japan, ran from July 15-24 in Surrey, B.C., and was attended by Bay, the Bays’ parents, Regula and their children.
Regula said in an email that his wife was mobbed virtually everywhere she went by Canadians who remembered her past glory, including an appearance in the Olympic bronze medal game in 2008. (She’s the second in her family to represent their country in the Games; her great uncle Gerry Moro competed as a decathlete.)
Regula said many fans considered his wife’s comeback inspirational.
“Maybe because I played a long time ago and did have that time off I think my perspective has changed dramatically just by playing,” Bay Regula said. “Knowing how one little thing could light up my kid’s life, I really tried to take everything in. I talked to a lot of moms who were all excited and are going to join gyms now.”
Their founding of TrAk Athletics, which limits membership to 200 and concentrates on group training, came after another one of Regula’s ‘take-a-chance’ moments.
He had worked as a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for more than 15 years. But Regula’s parents still live in Akron, along with his brother, a married father of three. Lauren and Dave didn’t miss a Fourth of July celebration in Ohio during their years in Chicago and returned for Thanksgiving/Christmas every other year.
Just over two years ago, they put their house on the market and it sold in two days. Looking for the best place to raise their children, they packed and headed to Akron.
“We kind of just made a decision on a whim,” Bay Regula said. “We’ve asked each other why didn’t we do it sooner. We’re really happy. We spent most of our time in a gym before we had kids and were part-owners of a gym [Windy City CrossFit] in Chicago. It was not where we felt like we were meant to be.”
Whether she’s meant to play competitive softball again remains to be seen. On the Canadian calendar is the Pan American Games qualifier in 2017 and those games in 2018. The vote on whether softball will return to the Olympics is next month. If the sport’s bid is approved, she explained the road to the Olympics would start with a 2018 qualifier in Japan, then the world championships in Japan, followed by a qualifier for each continent/region.
Bay Regula will try to make her husband’s philosophy her mantra and not worry about her next step.
“Looking out and seeing my kids and seeing my family and having that feeling that I’m doing something for myself, too, something of my old life, I felt like, ‘We took a chance, we figured it out and it worked out,’” she said of the just-completed world championship. “I’m going to try to keep that little nugget with me as I soldier on.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com.