JEFF JACOBS

It’s been a long trip home for Cheshire softballer

CHESHIRE — Mike Catanzarita walks downstairs on so many nights as the clock heads toward midnight. He finds his daughter in the basement of the family’s Cheshire home, still working on her swing, and he pitches those four familiar words.

Go to bed, Aliya! “She’s destroying my basement ceiling,” Catanzarita said. “And the ducts.”

He laughs the laugh of a parent’s admiration for a child’s unrelenting industry. The former homicide detective knows broken stuff in the basement can be fixed. He knows broken dreams cannot.

A junior at Cheshire Academy, Aliya Catanzarita recently became the school’s first softball player to commit to a Division I college program. She will attend Hofstra in 2019. She has been a team captain since she was a freshman and her coach, Samantha Cieri, said none of the older girls resented it a bit. She is a full International Baccalaureate student, one of a select group in the rigorous academic program at the school.

Aliya, 17, plans to major in biology or one of the sciences at Hofstra.

“I’d like to go with her,” her mom, Alicia, said, halfkidding. “It’ll be difficult when she goes, but I always wanted her to live her dream and her dream since

she was small has always been to play Division I softball. So nothing can make me more happy.”

Aliya’s softball journey began when she was 5. She asked her dad what was happening on the television screen. The Yankees were playing.

“I really liked it,” Aliya said. “It was really interesting.”

Yet to know Aliya one must dig back 41⁄2 years earlier to a journey that started half a world away. To September 2001, to Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, to the story of her adoption. Only then can we begin to understand the fuller picture of a family’s love and determination.

Living in San Diego, Mike and Alicia Catanzarita badly wanted children. At an adoption event, they saw a woman holding brochures about Kazakhstan. They next thing they knew they were in contact with Adoption Options.

“We did all the paperwork quick,” Mike said. “We were excited. We were scheduled to get her the week of 9/11. And then 9/11 happened.”

America was terrorized. A world was on edge. International travel screeched to a halt. The Catanzaritas were put on hold for three weeks.

“It was a difficult time for our country,” Alicia said, “but my baby was over there and I had to get her.”

They would arrive in Moscow, $14,000 each in cash strapped on money belts inside their pants. Two gentlemen met them. Mike and Alicia exchanged currency and were taken to another airport 45 minutes away where they waited. Suitcases in hands, Mike said, they were taken by horse trailer, zig-zagging through a graveyard of planes to their flight.

Once inside, he chipped ice off the window and put it in his wine glass. The plane landed somewhere in Russia in the middle of the night, they re-boarded and finally landed in Ust-Kamenogorsk. In the northeast of Kazakhstan, near the borders of Mongolia, Russia and China, hotel accommodations — well, they weren’t plush.

“Remember Batman had that red phone?” Mike said. “We had one in our room. The first night we were there we heard all these gunshots going off. When we leaned against the window, we could see police officers shooting their guns at their range right there next to us.”

The guns would get closer. One night drew particularly cold. The circus was in town. So they brought zoo animals into the hotel.

“A single woman was there adopting, too. She heard a lion roaring, called up the interpreter and said she was going down to Mike’s room,” Catanzarita said. “That got interpreted as ‘Mike’s causing a problem.’ ”

Suddenly, hotel security is at the door.

“They were yelling at us, in Russian or Kazakh, pointing a gun at me,” Mike said. “The interpreter comes running down the hall, yelling, ‘No! No! It’s OK.’

“The following morning we walked down four flights of stairs behind a llama. We saw monkeys running around in one room. It was crazy. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t lived it.”

The day they would meet 6-month-old Aliya would be the most awesome of their lives.

“She was the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen,” Alicia said. “She came out in this little pink outfit and I held her and squeezed her.”

Even now, 17 years later, tears well in Alicia’s eyes.

“When we got her that day, we had to fly to Almaty in the southern part of the country,” Mike said. “That night (U.S.-led coalition forces) started bombing Afghanistan. Our fighter jets were actually taking off from there.”

Fourteen days in UstKamenogorsk, five in Almaty. When the Catanzarias adopted their son, Michael, from Kazakhstan in 2004, there would be an embassy and their experience would be much different. In 2001, they had to return to Moscow to get a passport before finally going home.

“Before we adopted her, we did get Aliya’s medical records and a video of her and sent that to a specialist,” Mike said. “We didn’t have any bloodwork. When we got home we took her to a specialist. That’s when they told us Aliya had lead in her blood.”

Although lead poisoning can happen in various ways, Kazakhstan is among the most polluted countries in the world and Ust-Kamenogorsk is a mining center. There is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood and there can be severe mental and physical consequences.

“I’ll never forget, (a specialist) sat there across the desk and said, ‘Don’t expect a good student. Or a good athlete.’ ”

Aliya would become both.

“She has beaten all odds,” said Alicia, a federal probation officer supervisor in Bridgeport. “I think it’s in her heart. I think it always was in her heart.”

The family would move to Cheshire a decade ago. From rec to travel teams, Aliya grew with softball. Cieri talks about seeing photos of family vacations and there’s her shortstop throwing the ball. She is a fixture in the weight room. Aliya was quiet when she arrived, nervous about new surroundings. Yet this belies the fact that she was the one who filled out all the forms, initiated the essay to enroll in the prep school her parents say has made such a positive impact.

“The girls,” Cieri said, “look up to her.”

“My parents and my coaches taught me if you want to be good at something you’ve got to put the work in,” Aliya said.

If you don’t believe her, go down to the Catanzarita basement some night around midnight and admire that ceiling.

Pete Paguaga / Hearst Connecticut Media Cheshire Academy’s Aliya Catanzarita plays softball and has committed to play at Hofstra University. She was adopted when she was very young from Kazakhstan.