Port Jefferson's Abby Rolfe, Oyster Bay's Noelle Boruta making mark on baseball diamond
Their paths to the diamond may have been different, but their approach to the game is the same.
Port Jefferson senior Abby Rolfe and Oyster Bay junior Noelle Boruta both love to play baseball, and to them, being a girl playing on their school's varsity team is just another routine play.
“I’ve been playing with and against these guys my whole life," Boruta said. "I want to play baseball. I’m not trying to be or do something different.”
Boruta, 16, comes off the bench and plays second base for Oyster Bay. She’s appeared in 11 of the 18 games and has a .308 on-base percentage. She also is a top performer in the classroom with a weighted average of 99.
Rolfe, 17, is the starting leftfielder and a co-captain of the Port Jefferson team. She is hitting .408 with 15 RBIs and 13 runs scored through 14 games. Next year she will attend Ohio University, where she has been accepted into the nursing honors program.
“I see myself just as . . . an athlete,” she said. “I'm not really playing the game to be like the first woman to do this or that. I'm just playing because I love to compete and I love baseball.”
Overcoming obstacles
Port Jefferson baseball player Abigail Rolfe before her game against Bridgehampton on May 4, 2022. Credit: Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara
Rolfe was a standout on the Port Jefferson softball team before it stopped turning out enough girls to field a team. The news that Port Jefferson wouldn’t field a team in 2020 was crushing because, she said, “softball was my life for a while . . . it was heartbreaking.”
Rolfe is a dedicated competitor who also plays soccer and basketball. She still wanted to be involved with spring sports, so she approached Royals baseball coach Jesse Rosen — who also coaches the girls basketball program — and asked if she could be the manager. She said his reply was “if you're going to be the manager, I want you to at least try out.”
She attended the four days of tryouts for baseball and made the team before COVID-19 canceled the season.
“I fell in love with it pretty quickly,” Rolfe said. “It was definitely really hard at first, but I loved the game.”
Rolfe applied herself as she had in her other sports to make all the adjustments. She spent part of every day with her father, Mel, in the batting cage beyond the outfield wall at the Royals’ home field.
“You talk to people across sports who are going to say that the hardest thing in sports is to hit a baseball,” Rosen said. “What she's been able to do is a tribute to the fact that she's willing to work. . . . She repeats her mechanics as well as anyone I’ve seen. [Hitting] is something we would have seen as being a difficult thing, but she’s worked and had success.”
So much success, in fact, that in her second varsity season, she bats in the middle of the Royals’ order.
“At first, I honestly felt like I didn't deserve the [roster] spot,” Rolfe said. “I knew I was working hard and I deserved it in that aspect. But I didn't think I was good enough to be out there with those guys. But [Rosen] believed in me and I found out that I was good enough.”
From the beginning
Noelle Boruta of Oyster Bay at the plate during a baseball game on Thursday, May 5, 2022 in East Rockaway. Credit: Dawn McCormick
Boruta has been a baseball player from the start and has always played against boys. She played Little League and with summer travel teams and — after her freshman season was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic and she opted out of her COVID-compressed sophomore season — went out for the Baymen varsity and made the team.
Boruta had to overcome other obstacles on her way to making varsity. She knew most of her teammates from playing with and against them in youth baseball and on summer travel teams. All of them, though, now were bigger, stronger and faster.
“The pitching you face here is better, and when you get hit by a pitch you feel it more,” she said. “The fundamentals are the same, though, and that helped. I already knew the game.”
When Boruta was in fifth grade, her father, Bobby, suggested that with all her baseball experience, she would be a natural in softball. She was convinced to try it, but it just didn’t take.
“The pitching was underhand and totally unfamiliar — I just couldn’t get a grasp on it,” she said. “It’s a different game. I was a baseball player and I was much better at baseball than I was at softball. And I love baseball. I belong playing baseball.”
Boruta also gets to show her competitive streak in the winter as a starting guard on the girls basketball team. A three-year varsity player, she is a strong ballhandler with an accurate three-point shot.
“Everyone knew her because she’d been to our baseball camps . . . and she was serious about competing,” Oyster Bay coach Jeff Schiereck said. “She’s a sound player. She’s a solid defender who I am comfortable having in the field. She’s a smart baserunner who reads the plays in front of her well.”
He added, “Nothing has been given to her. She is accepted by her teammates because she has earned it by showing up every day, working hard and loving the game.”
'The same as everybody else'
Neither coach needed to say much to his players about a girl joining the team. Schiereck's message to the Oyster Bay players — and to Boruta — was simple: “She’s the same as everybody else,” he said. “We’ve seen girls play other sports — like football — and it’s great. If there’s something you have a passion for, you should be playing, and hers is baseball.”
Rolfe and Boruta both bring a self-confidence that’s made playing among boys work.
“Beginning when I played Little League, I’d hear people say, ‘Is that a girl?' And I’d always let them know I’d heard it by saying, ‘Yep, it is,' " Boruta said.
Abby's mother, Joan Rolfe, a former star softball player at Stony Brook University, said she initially was concerned about the potential for issues.
“But the boys at Port Jefferson treated Abby like a sister when she joined the team,” Joan Rolfe said. “Now that she is a team captain and one of the only seniors, it’s like they see a big sister. . . . I may have had a few reservations, but Abby is having an amazing experience playing baseball.”
Abby Rolfe's co-captain, Luke Filippi, admitted to having his reservations at first.
“A girl joining our team, I wasn't really ready for that,” Filippi said. “Then she came down to the first practice and she was better than most of us. I was pretty excited about it after that.”
“He accepted me and I’m sure he told the other players I was the real deal and able to compete,” Rolfe said. “I was intimidated at first because I’m with a bunch of guys and I’m the only girl. Now I see them as the best teammates I’ve ever had in my life. They’d do anything for me and I would do anything for them.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
