Long before her dad, Kalen DeBoer, arrived on the scene as one of the top coaches in college football, Washington's Alexis DeBoer announced herself as a budding slugger on the softball scene.
She was a 6-year-old kindergartner playing youth softball in Carbondale, Illinois, where Kalen was the offensive coordinator at Southern Illinois, one of the many stops on his way to becoming head coach at Alabama.
On this spring day, while most of the other kids were playing in the dirt, Alexis stepped to the plate (the coaches pitched to the kids at that age) and smacked a ball over the outfield fence that ricocheted off her mother's Honda Pilot.