​Pictured: Maggie and Ed Gallagher

Unlike most stories, we’ll start this one at the end of the tale.

Today, Maggie Gallagher—a 2016 infielder from Seattle, Washington—is living the dream of young softball players everywhere as she’s committed to play top-tier DI ball after getting and accepting an offer to play at the University of Washington last fall.

A smooth-fielding, fierce-hitting shortstop and third baseman at Kennedy Catholic in Burien, Washington, she was named a MaxPreps Small Schools All-American last season after hitting .719 with 34 RBI and leading her Lancers to the Seamount League title.

A recent addition to the NW Bullets club team of Oregon, which won the TC/USA Nationals and ended the 2015-2016 rated as the No. 16 team in the FloSoftball Final 2015-16 18U club rankings, Maggie has an exciting future ahead of her.

But even though she’ll play for the Huskies starting next fall and lives just 15 minutes from the Pac-12 school’s campus, the young athlete’s journey started more than 6,300 miles away as she was born July 24, 1998 in Shantou, China.

And her path to becoming one of the top fastpitch players in the U.S. is unlike any story you’ve ever heard.

***

Maggie’s first 18 months of life were spent in an orphanage.

Her birth mother—for reasons that will never be known—abandoned the newborn baby on a sidewalk where she was found by a policeman and placed in an orphanage.  

She grew up with the name “Dujuan” meaning “beautiful flower” because it was the name of the police officer.

Meanwhile, half a world a way in Seattle, Ed and Mary Gallagher had successfully raised four children between them in separate marriages and once they remarried agreed they wanted to adopt a child.

Working through WACAP, an international non-profit adoption agency, they were able to locate and adopt Maggie when she was just a year and a half old.

“She’s the fifth child and we have the same love and affection for her as we do as the other four,” says her father. “It’s no different.”

Her older siblings—two brothers and a pair of sisters—are close to her as is all the family.  Maggie says her Aunt Liz traveled from Portland this summer to watch the athlete play in the PGF Nationals (then with the Washington Ladyhawks).

“My family means the world to me,” Maggie says softly. “They’ve supported me through good and bad, in everything including softball.”

She naturally doesn’t remember her beginnings in China; her earliest memories—not surprisingly—have to do with sports.

“I was always trying to pick up a basketball or do something active,” she recalls. “I’ve played seven sports and have always been into athletics.  It’s my go-to way to let stress out.”

In time, she cut down her team sports activities to basketball, soccer and baseball, but in the eighth grade switched over to softball and never looked back.  She says the switch to her current sport wasn’t difficult.

“It wasn’t that hard,” she explains, “because if you can hit a little baseball coming at you so fast, you can hit anything. My biggest surprise in softball was I’d hit the ball and it wouldn’t go as far as I thought it would!”

It wasn’t long before Maggie was dominating on the field, especially at the plate where her keen eyes, quick hands and smooth stroke from the left side had her hitting a remarkable .695 as a sophomore and .719 as a junior.

Even before she switched to softball, though, Maggie had e-mailed coach Heather Tarr not to get recruited but to ask her about whether she should quit baseball.  Surprisingly, Coach Tarr told her to stay in it a while longer because of the good coaching the teen was receiving.


​Maggie, seen here getting a single at the PGF Ultimate Challenge for the NW Bullets, hit .719 as a high school junior.

After finally converting to softball, Maggie attended Husky camps her sophomore and junior years and was so impressive that last November 19, Maggie was invited to the Washington office where she received her official offer. The prolific hitter says she “committed on the spot.”

Carrying a 3.9 GPA heading into her final year of high school, the teen student-athlete says she’s undecided on what she wants to major in at Washington.  She’s thinking perhaps of becoming a veterinarian or going into Criminal Justice.

She does, however, have some specific goals she’s set for herself.

“I want to graduate college with a great degree, travel the world and win a national championship in softball.”

As for tracing her ancestry, Maggie says she almost went back to China in the eighth grade but “became too busy with softball.”  She hopes to go back after college and explore the land where she’s from.

Her parents offered to help her learn Chinese when she was younger but Maggie turned it down.  

Still, as most who are adopted know, there are yearnings to find out where one came from and the Seattle teenager admits she’d like to find her birth parents someday, but concedes it’d be like “finding a needle in a haystack.” One possibility is to do a fingerprint scan and see if there’s a match with family in China.

Still, Maggie says she has a wonderful life with a family “I love more than anything in the world.”

She adds: “It’s sometimes like a dream, I have a great family who supports me in everything, I’m playing a sport I love and will get to play at my dream school just a few miles away.”

“Who could ask for anything more?”