Lisa FernÁndez

Softball is a family sport for Fernández. Her father played semiprofessional baseball in Cuba until he fled the country as a political refugee after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962. After he married Fernández's mother, the two played together in slow-pitch leagues. Fernández started to play softball very young, and when she was eight she became the pitcher for a local girls' team.

Fernández's first outing as a pitcher was not very successful. She threw three balls in a row to the first batter, and then hit the child in the head with her fourth pitch. By the end of the game, her team had lost 25-0. But Fernández stuck with the sport. She and her mother practiced pitching in their backyard, and the more Fernández worked the more her team's scores improved.

Fernández turned another excuse to give up into a reason to work harder when she was 12 years old and a noted pitching coach told her that her arms were too

Lisa Fernández

short. She would never be a competitive pitcher past the age of 16, he told her. As Fernández has told the story numerous times, she left his office and started to bawl, thinking that her career was over. Her mother turned around and yelled, "Stop crying! …If you ever let someone in life tell you what you can or cannot do, you'll never make it," she told Larry O'Rourke of the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call.