Team Canada in Tokyo – Jennifer Gilbert – Softball

What do you do when a lifelong dream is taken away from you?

That was the heartbreaking question that softball player Jennifer Gilbert faced in 2005, when the International Olympic Committee voted to remove her sport from the Olympic program starting in 2012.

“For me personally I didn’t know what the dream was going to be,” Gilbert said. “The rug was ripped out right from under me.”

Softball had been a part of the Olympics since its debut in Atlanta in 1996, but after the Beijing Games in 2008, that run would end leaving Gilbert gutted and unsure what the next step would be.

Gilbert had sacrificed a lot in her journey, including large parts of her social life growing up in pursuit of her Olympic goal, beginning at the age of eight.

“It was on a car journey where I turned to my mom and said, ‘I want to play for Canada in the Olympics some day,’” Gilbert recalled. “My mom was so surprised that an eight-year old-could say something so profound!”

With the chance to represent her country on the biggest stage of them all at least on pause, Gilbert was undeterred. She continued to pursue the sport throughout her Exercise Science studies at Ball State University, where she scooped up almost countless records.

She finished her collegiate career in 2014 as the league record holder in RBI, runs and doubles as well as being the all-time leader among Canadian-born players in home runs with 75.

Then, two years later, the IOC announced softball was back for the 2020 Games in Tokyo, joined by debuting sports of karate, skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing.

“When they put it back in 2016 it was like, ‘Yes, let’s go.’. This is what I’ve been waiting for this whole time. Its’ so great that they put it back. Everything I have done softball-wise has led to this moment,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert was born in Saskatoon, but moved to Texas at age three with her family due to her father’s work.

“My dad was involved in the animal science genetics field so he actually got a job at the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, and I was born in Saskatoon at St. Paul’s Hospital,” Gilbert said.

“I keep in contact with the Canadian Olympic Centre in Saskatchewan, they send me gift baskets every year and give me a lot of support and I’m very grateful for that,” Gilbert said

Naturally, things were never going to be straightforward for Gilbert to realize her goal, and despite a Pan American Games silver medal in 2019 with a .429 average, and Olympic qualification secured weeks later, COVID-19 would present the next obstacle.

“COVID has definitely been a challenge we didn’t see coming,” Gilbert said of the pandemic. “We were in Halifax at the time when COVID was just a rumour and we didn’t know what the impact was. Thankfully we already planned to go on break March 15, 2020, so we were all at home.

“We have had a lot of Zoom meetings online, and luckily I live on a farm in Texas so I was able to train there on my own, I ordered a lot of equipment off Amazon!”

Gilbert puts a lot of pressure on herself, and works around the Vince Lombardi quote “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

“You set the bar so so high,’ she said. “We are all human and not perfect, but I can control how I train, what I train for, and then I have to trust that training.

“We work hard, we grind it out, we ask each other questions. I will say I don’t think any team at the Olympics is working harder right now,” Gilbert said.

Now 29, and with softball not currently on the schedule for the Paris Games in 2024, Gilbert knows this may be her only shot, and she is buoyant about her team’s chances.

“We are playing to win a gold medal, we say that every day,” she said. “That is what we are training for and have been training for in the last three or four years.

“We are going to do some really great things, you guys are going to see.”

Gilbert and Team Canada take their Olympic softball bow at midnight on July 21 against Mexico, the first of five group stage games.

Catch Team Canada’s round-robin games:
Canada vs Mexico – July 21 – 00:00
Canada vs USA – July 21 – 18:00
Canada vs Australia – July 23 – 19:00
Canada vs Japan – July 24 – 23:30
Canada vs Italy – July 25 – 23:30

Listen to the full interview here – https://iono.fm/e/1075458