Former Cedar Crest pitcher finds healing through softball after family tragedies

There are those who see sports as simply a game that is played for fun, an essentially mindless undertaking that has no real value in one’s life outside the white lines the sport is played within.

Jen Garloff Becker would dare to differ most decidedly with that viewpoint.

A former ace pitcher for the Cedar Crest softball team before graduating in 2008, Garloff, 35, will always have a special place in her heart for softball, a sport she remains involved in to this day as a private pitching instructor who teaches the finer point of the sport to youth softball players.

Garloff is still there for softball because it has always been there for her, helping to guide her through and give purpose to a life that has known far more than its share of heartbreak.

Particularly since age 10, when her mother, Linda Garloff, was diagnosed with terminal cancer that would eventually take her life, three short weeks after Jen’s Cedar Crest graduation on May 29, 2008. On June 18, 2008, Linda was gone. Fortunately, Jen’s coping mechanism was still there

Softball has remained a trusted companion and confidant throughout some extremely difficult years since Linda’s passing, including the unexpected death of her father, Jim “Spank” Garloff, three years ago, and the tough-to-take 2023 juvenile diabetes diagnosis her now 4-year old daughter, Caleena, was hit with a year and a half back.

“Softball saved me, day in and day out,” Jen said recently. “Softball was my escape because (due to her illness), my mom never left the house. Everybody rallied around my family and made sure I got to my (games.). And my dad was with me, too. It also became his out. Those couple hours that we were at the field, nothing else mattered. My connection to softball is way deeper than surface level.”

Although it did provide a welcome respite from her mom’s illness, not even softball could help Jen escape from the painful reality that her mom was slowly dying in front of her on a daily basis. She had her dad and older sister Megan, but at a time when she needed her mom the most, cancer cruelly continued to stealing Linda away.

“It was hard, I had to grow up really young,” Jen recalled. “The reality was, I wasn’t going to have one parent for a lot of things later in life.”

Linda proved herself to be quite the competitor as well, vowing she would live to see her youngest daughter graduate. She did, by just a few weeks, and Jen has never forgotten it.

“My mom was a fighter,” Jen said, with no small amount of pride. “She said at my sister’s graduation that she would live to see me graduate and she did. I think it was from her that I got my ability to fight.”

And fight she did, pitching and hitting the Falcons into the District 3 playoffs that final spring of 2008.

Her efforts did not go unnoticed by rival teams and players who knew what she was going through.

Jen fondly recalls her Senior Day game that year in which she was approached by a McCaskey player who had marveled at Jen’s strength from afar that season until she had the chance to do it person, telling her that, “I don’t know how you’re doing this.”

Jen was, of course, touched by the gesture but also a bit stunned by it.

“I think we both started crying,” Jen said.

It wasn’t the only time someone expressed amazed respect to Jen about her ability to handle adversity that spring.

“You’re 17 years old, and you’re like, ‘Who am I,'” Jen said. “You realize that people not necessarily look up to you, but they admire what you’re doing. They admire the qualities you hold and the strength that you have.”

“I didn’t have an option. To not let my mom down, I didn’t have an option.”

The road to happiness and some sense of normalcy has grown longer since her dad passed and Caleena received her diabetes diagnosis while Jen’s husband of nine years, Cory, a member of the military, was being deployed with his unit.

Guess how Jen found her way through those latest round of challenges.

“Softball is still my stress reliever,” she said.

And she is still being looked up to, like she was back in the day when she was fighting to make her mom proud. This time it’s by kids she works with as an instructor who are going through the same things now that she was then.

“There’s connections that I now make with my (softball) kids that are different, ” Jen said of sharing her experiences with her charges.

Understandably though, Jen still has moments when she reaches for her mom or dad to lend a shoulder to cry on, such as during Caleena’s initial diabetes battle, and is again sideswiped by painful reality.

“You don’t realize stuff until it’s gone,” she said. “You don’t realize how stuff can come back down the road. Like my mom was a nurse who I feel like would have been a great grandparent to have around to help.”

Jen, though, has done rather well for herself persevering through life’s storms. And because she has, she can off some sage advice.

“You can’t let it consume you,” she said. “Anything that you’re faced with, you can either let it take you down or you can make the best of it. I chose not to let my mom’s disease affect my life more than what it had to.”

Didn’t she ever get tired of softball though? Didn’t she ever get sick of needing it so much?

A parent of a girl Jen now instructs asked almost the same thing: Did she ever fall out of love with softball?

“One of my former clients, her dad had asked me, ‘Did you ever fall out of love with the game of softball?’

“My response back to him was, did I ever lose my fire and desire for the game? Absolutely. Every time it got hard, I hated the game. Every time I was surpassed by someone who was better than me, I wanted to quit.

“But did I ever fall out of love with the game of softball? No, because I never lost sight of the relationship I had with the game. I think that’s what you have to remember, you have to remember why you’re doing it.”