Former UA star Danielle O'Toole finds contentment in new role on pro softball circuit

Danielle O’Toole and Dejah Mulipola are two names that will always seem to go hand in hand.

They had a special bond from the get-go. It always seemed natural for O’Toole to pitch to Mulipola — as if the duo was always meant to be.

They only teamed up for one year as O’Toole was finishing her career among the best who ever pitched for Arizona, while Mulipola was just a freshman getting started putting her stamp on the program as one of the top Wildcat catchers.

In O’Toole’s final push as UA ace, she was a first-team NFCA All-American, Pac-12 Pitcher of the Year, a finalist for USA Softball Player of the Year, Pac-12 All-Conference, pitched two no-hitters against Washington and finished 30-5 with a league-best 1.21 ERA and 210 strikeouts in 219 innings.

Now the band is back together again … well, sort of.

Mulipola is a team captain for Athletes Unlimited AUX, whose season starts Monday and runs through June 27.

O’Toole is a facilitator after retiring from playing at the end of last summer. In her new role, she helps the captains draft teams, advises them along the way and even manages the lineup in-game — which is an additional task she will have with Mulipola this week.

So far, the transition back to the professional league in a new role fits like a well-worn glove, especially with her former batterymate alongside.

“You know what’s funny is everyone calls her Dejah, because that’s her name, but a few hours ago, we were doing the draft, and I said, ‘Muli,’ just like instinctually, and I have not called her Muli in a long time — not since we played together,” O’Toole said. “I called her Muli, and she responded, and everyone in the chat was kind of like, ‘What? What did you call her?’

“It’s been nice to touch base with her again. … It’s been pretty fun with her. She’s intelligent. She knows what she wants.”

Athletes Unlimited is an innovative, player-run league heading into its third full season (July 28-Aug. 27) and second for this shorter AUX season, which was held in San Diego last year. This time it’s right outside Chicago.

All games are televised on ESPNU and ESPN2, with two games played each day.

Dealing with pain

Mulipola’s team this week has a loaded lineup with hitters such as Victoria Hayward, Tori Vidales, Jazmyn Jackson, Kelsey Stewart-Hunter, Nicole Mendes and Aubrey Leach.

For a moment, O’Toole got a little mixed up and thought, “I don’t want to throw to that.” Then she quickly realized she didn’t have to.

It was an easy slip-up for O’Toole to think that she was still pitching. After all, she played in this event last year and edged Rachel Garcia and Mulipola to win the title.

She finished with a 1.69 ERA over 28 innings, allowing batters to hit just .206 against her.

As she was watching the final game that determined whether she would be the first AUX champion, she thought, “I did everything I could have for this moment and no matter what happens I believe in myself.”

“There’s so much left to this life, and I have so much of my life to live,” O’Toole said. “Everything I’ve worked for, yes, it comes down to this moment of being on top, but I earned it. I deserve it. And it was great. It was super emotional, but it was it was great.”

It was even more special for O’Toole, who had gone through so much mentally and physically to get to that moment.

It all started more than a year before as she was gearing up to play for Team Mexico in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo — the games that were postponed until the summer of 2021 because of COVID-19.

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O’Toole said that she was not in a good place mentally leading up to the Olympics. Then she tore her labrum a little more than a month before she had to compete.

She took a cortisone shot for the pain. It would have been “impossible to pitch otherwise, she said.

“That’s why my motion, my windup changed for the Olympics a little bit,” O’Toole said. “I actually drove to go see a pitching coach, Trisha Ford, to help me out a little bit because I was not feeling good. My arm was all weird, and I was just like, ‘I am going to the Olympics, and I need to be as good as I can be with my arm messed up. So how do we fix this?’

“We changed my windup where I could tolerate the pain a little bit, and I just went for it. I was like, ‘You know what? There’s nothing else I can do. Just go to work.’”

The lefty threw 17 innings for Team Mexico, giving up three earned runs, allowing 13 hits, striking out seven and walking two for a 1.23 ERA and a 0.88 WHIP. Team Mexico finished in fourth place, losing in the bronze medal game to Canada, 3-2.

‘I know my worth’

O’Toole went from the Olympics to her AU season and finished near the bottom of the pack. Besides the torn labrum, which had not healed correctly, she was going through a “depression where I couldn’t see the next step. I couldn’t see myself moving forward.”

Many athletes face what is called a post-Olympic depression after they compete. They experience emotions ranging from grief to exhaustion to burnout to a release of all the stress and expectations that come with competing. Then there’s finding your identity or purpose after striving to be elite in your sport. Only in the last few years have athletes such as O’Toole started talking about that aspect of competing and how they work through it.

O’Toole, who turns 29 in July, knew she was going to retire. But she didn’t want to go out like this. In tandem with rehabbing her arm correctly and staying in top shape, O’Toole went to work on the mental side with the help of a therapist and a sports psychologist.

“It was not putting it behind me or forgetting it, it (was) laying it all out in front of me and really coming to grips with ... what was going on with me and why I was acting this way, why I was behaving (like this), what was causing me to feel this way,” O’Toole said. “I really broke it down, went through it.

“Just learning how to cope, I think, is what really helped me come back stronger for the AU season last year, and really knowing I don’t have to be in that environment anymore. I’m free to be me. I’m free to be whoever I want.

“I know my worth, I know my value. I really worked hard to just be myself.”

That work changed O’Toole’s mentality heading into the inaugural AUX season in June of 2022. For someone who has always been a “humble athlete,” she transitioned to “I could be the best player out here, so why not me?”

“I took a different route with my confidence, because I’ve always been very ‘It’s my team, fly under the radar. I know I’m good, but other people around me are the reason I’m good,’ ” O’Toole said. “When I did all that work on myself and when I did it for me, it just felt super empowering to be able to change my story.”

Over the last five years O’Toole has been working in the college game as a pitching coach — first at San Diego and the last three seasons at Cal State Fullerton. Her calling, she said, is to “make them good athletes and good people.”

O’Toole currently is in limbo, seeking her next position. She wants to coach at a Power Five school. With softball adding a new paid coaching position come July 1, there will be a lot of movement this summer. Although she feels a bit nervous about where she will land, over the next few weeks, O’Toole will be in her happy place with her people.

“My thought was, why not facilitate? It is a great way for me to feel engaged with my friends because every single year that we’ve had professional ball, I know that I’m coming back to play. I know my friends are coming back,” O’Toole said. “It’s like built-in friend time. Everyone lives in a different state. It’s really hard to see them in the offseason. … I feel very blessed, very honored that we were the first to start this league, and it’s sustainable.

“(Last year) I worked hard in my bullpens to make sure I came back as good as I could be physically and emotionally, mentally — all of it to come back on top. When I did, I was so thankful because I worked hard to get here. I might as well just go be No. 1. And I did.”

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