Vanessa Soto-Laughlin’s life has been like a roller coaster ride the past three months. 

A former Division I softball all-conference second baseman for two Louisiana powerhouse programs, Laughlin has recently managed to parlay a potentially life-threatening health scare into a new once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity melding her expertise in technology with her passion for the game of softball. 

About three months ago, Laughlin visited her doctor for a routine checkup when a lump on her thyroid was revealed. 

“The doctor said they were pretty common but wanted to do an ultrasound,” Laughlin said. “The specialist said it was too big and awkwardly shaped and that we needed to do a biopsy. We couldn’t rule anything out. Now I’m really freaking out. I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I never had an injury in college and I was thinking there’s no way I have cancer.”

Laughlin described the “awful” experience of having a nine-inch needle placed down her throat. 

“My doctor called me a few days later and I was standing right at my desk just like I’m doing now and thinking my life is either going to go left or right in the next few seconds. She said, ‘Vanessa, it’s benign and you’re fine.’ I got super emotional and I was so relieved," Laughlin said. "The funny thing was the first thing I thought was: I’m quitting my job. That was the biggest thing in my life and I was successful and making a lot of money, but I wasn’t happy doing it. It took that wake-up call to realize it. When I went home that night my wife and I were talking about it and I kept thinking about was what it is I enjoy the most. When someone asks me that question, the first think I think of is softball.”

She added: “I knew I had an extensive track record and resume to support technology and I also had been a really competitive Division I athlete and had coached softball, so I thought maybe there was a way I can merge the two together.”

That same night, Laughlin hopped on the computer and checked out LinkedIn’s job postings. The first one she saw at the top of the page was for a Blast Motion softball regional sales rep who would report to the baseball manager. 

“I was like, ‘No way!’ How can a company like this be looking for someone in softball on the same day I’m like having this life-changing moment,” she said. “So I applied and thought there is no way they’ll call me. The next day they called me, and the rest is history.”

Laughlin knows the challenges of having to find a job after graduation after playing competitive softball her entire life. 

“It’s absolutely crazy if you go back to 2009 when I was graduating college," she said. "Like most collegiate softball players I did not have anything on my resume for my first employer to see in terms of experience that they could use as a reference point or gauge that I would be qualified to do the job I was applying for. I had never even waited a table. I had never poured a cup of coffee. I had never done anything except play softball. I also graduated in 2009 when the economy was really bad, and so finding a job was really difficult at the time.”

She soon got a position at JP Morgan Chase Bank and began working in merchant processing. 

“I didn’t even know what that was,” Laughlin said. “I was fortunate that I had a skill set that being an athlete and softball taught me. Things like dedication, the quality of your character and your work ethic. All of these things made me a very successful employee.”

But her job left her unfulfilled. 

“I never once woke up and said: ‘I really can’t wait to talk to a merchant about interchange,’” she said. “The thing that really motivated me was being in sales and that really fed the beast in me, so to speak. It fed my competitive juices I had all those years playing softball.”

After her stint at Chase, Laughlin served one season as an assistant softball coach at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2013, before returning back to the world of sales. 

“I feel like I’m a different person,” Laughlin said of her current job at Blast Motion. “I wake up talking about something I’m tremendously passionate about. I’m doing something that was very important to me when I coaching which was to give back to the sport and possibly make the next generation of softball players better. But now I’m doing it through technology in a really unique way, and not just through coaching or mentoring. So it’s just really neat.”’

A Nashville resident, Laughlin is the new softball channel manager for Blast Motion, a company based near her original hometown in Carlsbad, California, in San Diego County. Blast Motion is defining the future of wearable motion capture technology, and has taken the softball world by storm. 

Here's how their company website describes their mission: “By combining the industry’s most complete performance improvement solution and real-time metrics analysis with auto-curated video highlights, Blast Motion has created a contextually rich user experience that enhances the way people capture, analyze, and improve their game.” 

Laughlin — who played three season for Louisiana State University before transferring to the University of Louisiana-Lafayette for her senior season — said Blast Motion recently responded reactively to softball after so much success in baseball, including calling 12 Major League Baseball teams’ users of the technology.  

The Blast Motion web portal is a reporting tool that gives softball coaches the ability to dive in and get data they would not normally be exposed to. 

“It’s an end-to-end coaching tool whether you are a Division I college, JUCO coach, academy coach, high school coach, or travel coach,” Laughlin said. “It’s applicable to all scenarios. To me, that is where the benefit to Blast is. Our sensor is just a means to gather the data to get us there. But we are an information company and when we have that information available we can then turn that information into insight, and then you can use that information to your advantage.”

Ten years ago Laughlin would have never dreamed that a job at Blast Motion would exist. And now she’s contributing to a game she loves while nerding out on technology. 

Written by Steve Pratt