Stanford catcher’s backup plan is a career in medicine
STANFORD, Calif. — Last summer in the Cape Cod League, when almost everybody else focused on baseball and nothing more, Maverick Handley carved out extra time to work toward his pre-med path and future after sports.
Observe a surgery in his spare time? Absolutely.
Handley is a junior catcher at Stanford who's eligible for this week's amateur draft. His fallback plan is to attend medical school and become an orthopedic surgeon.
At home in Colorado, Handley shadows doctors at every chance. He did the same while playing for Falmouth on the Cape.
“No internships that were too serious where I was really getting my hands dirty and putting in some serious hours, but enough to where I'm still getting exposure and making sure I'm still interested,” Handley said. “Ideally, I go out and play baseball forever, and when I'm 40, I can be like, ‘ All right, what do I want to do with my life?' It's definitely stuff that interests me.”
All of the doctors he encounters encourage Handley to chase his baseball dream first, telling him, “You can always go back to medical school, you can't always play baseball.”
“It's just kind of stuck with me,” he said.
For now, his focus is on a deep postseason run with the Cardinal. Handley was hitting .291 with two home runs, 13 doubles, three triples and 19 RBIs for 11th-seeded Stanford going into this weekend's NCAA regional at home.
On Wednesday, he was named a Pac-12 Co-Defensive Player of the Year and to the all-conference team after leading the league with seven pickoffs. Handley threw out 10 baserunners attempting steals.
Somehow, with all the demands of being a Stanford student-athlete majoring in bioengineering, Handley has created an impressive balance. His 3.78 gradepoint average is tied for the highest on the Pac-12 AllAcademic team announced Thursday.
Handley's mother, Jill, is a certified nursing assistant who cares for his 7-year-old brother with autism. Knox is a first-grader in an inclusive classroom.
“He's grown so much, which is awesome,” Handley said.
A broken ankle suffered during his sophomore year of high school helped spark Handley's interest in medicine. He has observed a half-dozen or so surgeries.
“If you've never been in a hospital or in a surgery, you don't have any exposure to it and you're not going to really know what it's like or why you'd be interested in it besides people saying ‘doctors make a lot of money,' ” he says. “It was a pretty cool experience.”
Handley intends to use offseason breaks to focus on his next career, with plans to return to Stanford in the fall to finish his degree.
“Once he knows what he wants to do, he just makes it so that it's impossible for him not to do it,” Cardinal assistant coach Jack Marder said. “I think the reason why he's interested in surgery or the medical field, I think he looks at it and goes, ‘I can make a huge impact on this and it's exciting for me, it's fun and it challenges me, so why not see if I can do it?' For the backup plan of it, I think that he's always thinking, ‘How can I maximize myself as a person first?' versus it being, ‘I have this pressure on me to maximize what other people want from me.' ” any athlete he's ever tutored in his 17 years of coaching, but Vaught did recognize Patterson's gifts right away.
“I remember the first time I saw him on video, and the first person I thought of was LaShawn Merritt,” said Vaught, referring to the graduate of Wilson High in Portsmouth who won two Olympic gold medals in the 4x400 relay and a gold and a bronze in the 400. “I remember when I saw (Merritt) in high school, the first day I saw him, I said, ‘I have to get that kid.' That's the exact same feeling I felt when I saw Jacory run on video.”
Patterson, whose final college decision came down to Tech, Louisiana State, Iowa, Clemson and South Carolina, has no regrets about going all-in with track.
Now, Patterson has his sights set on further establishing himself on the track. Austin is consuming his thoughts.
“This is an opportunity to put my name more out there,” said Patterson, who will also compete June 21-23 at the Pan-American U20 Championships trials. “I feel like once I put together everything in my race and run a physically sound race with everything me and Coach Vaught talk about, then I could maybe blow up a little more, hopefully.” Norm Wood, 757-247-4642, nwood@dailypress.com