Diamond Details: Heidi Freitager

Story Links

Members of the Virginia softball team – both student-athletes and coaches – will be revealing 20 random facts about themselves to VirginiaSports.com each weekday leading up to the team’s season-opener on Saturday, Feb. 13th at the Elon Tournament in Elon, N.C. Up next is assistant coach Heidi Freitager, a Minnesota native who is in her second season with the Cavaliers.

1. I’ve had 14 concussions, the first of which was caused when I was running late for practice in college and tried to run down and icy hill, fell, and slid into my teammate who then fell on my head.

2. My favorite fast food place is Sonic. Please build one in Charlottesville!

3. My head is so big that before I was born, doctors told my mother there was potentially something wrong with me. (It’s size 7-5/8.)

4. After 30 years, I finally quit biting my nails this year. (Mom will LOVE that one!)

5. As part of my graduate degree, I traveled to Beijing, China, learned Mandarin, and took eastern sports medicine classes.

6. I get extremely nervous when I meet famous people for the first time. Or people that are famous to me. Like when I met Coach Schmidt because she was a national team catcher.

7. I possess unhealthy amounts of AM (ask Coach Schmidt what that means).

8. I am a spelling bee champion.

9. I carry a Family Guy “Something Something Something Darkside” lunchbox.

10. I had an opossum climb up my Christmas tree inside my house. (Coach Hirai will have an item on his list related to that episode.)

11. I am a professional bowler on the Wii and my Wii sports age is 25.

12. My mom taught me how to knit, crochet, and cross-stitch.

13. I am ridiculously scared of spiders of ANY size.

14. I once lost a bet to a team I was coaching and ended up having to get my tongue pierced on the strip in Vegas.

15. To challenge myself in school, I would deliberately procrastinate on assignments and papers.

16. At one point, I had pi memorized out to 100 digits just because I could – now I’m back down to about 25.

17. I’m a total pack rat when it comes to certain items and refuse to get rid of them no matter if I will ever use them again or not – books, Tupperware, t-shirts, and socks come to mind.

18. My current ring tone on my cell phone is the theme song from “The Office”.

19. My jobs during my college years included selling vacuum cleaners, cooking at a sports bar, selling floating water trampolines, being a data entry monkey, and writing a sports column for a newspaper.

20. I picked my uniform number because my dad wore #20 as a coach.