Spartan Spotlight: Chad Sobotka and Kayla McAvoy
2/14/2021 12:11:00 PM | Baseball, Women's Volleyball, General
SPARTANBURG, S.C. – Former Spartan student-athletes Chad Sobotka and Kayla McAvoy feel like they owe a lot to USC Upstate. After all, it is the place where the soon-to-be married couple met and began their relationship. Like the rest of the world, the couple took what 2020 threw at them, from enduring an MLB season completely altered by COVID-19, to working on the frontlines during the pandemic, to making the difficult decision of changing the date of one of the most important days of their lives.
Sobotka was a member of the Spartan baseball team from 2011-2014. The right-handed pitcher is the highest draft pick in USC Upstate's program history, taken in the fourth round, 133rd overall, by the Atlanta Braves in the 2014 MLB Draft.
A native of Sarasota, Fla., Sobotka says he knew from an early age that he wanted to play professional baseball, but it wasn't until his freshman year at USC Upstate that his dream felt like it could actually turn into reality.
"It all started at an early age. I started playing baseball when I was four, but the real thought of playing professionally didn't truly hit me until I got to USC Upstate. That was the only school that recruited me out of high school, so I took that offer, and freshman year is when I made my big velocity jump and put on some weight," Sobotka said. "Looking back, freshman year was the big turning point for me, and I'm so grateful to be where I am right now and to have had great coaches and family that supported me."
Heading into his junior season, a number of MLB clubs were interested in Sobotka. However, after an unfortunate back injury right before the season was supposed to start, Sobotka thought his dream of getting that phone call on draft day had potentially been put in jeopardy.
"When I injured my back, about half the teams that were interested in me backed off, so leading up to draft day was tough. I didn't know who was onto me and who wasn't onto me," Sobotka explained. "I did a couple pre-draft workouts, one at USC Upstate and one back home in Sarasota, but when draft day came around, I didn't know what to expect. There were a lot of articles and rumors out there, but I didn't pitch at all my junior year, so I was a little worried about it."
When the fourth round of the draft started, Atlanta Braves area scout Billy Best paid Sobotka a phone call to tell him the Braves were looking at taking him with the 133rd pick, and to see what Sobotka thought about it. "I just told him, 'I'd love to be a Brave, and I think this is my time,' and then about two picks before me, Billy called me back and said, 'Chad, we're going to take you in that position.' It was just a crazy and surreal moment. I hadn't even really talked to the Braves too much and I didn't know where I was going to fall in the draft," Sobotka said. "I had my friends, family, and Kayla next to me and getting that phone call just made a dream come true, but I knew it was only the beginning of where I wanted to get to. Not many people gave me the chance to get to where I was, so it was an amazing moment I had."
McAvoy played volleyball for USC Upstate from 2011-2014. Though she missed her junior season due to injury, the middle blocker/outside hitter ranked top-3 on the team in hitting and blocking all three years she played. She was named to the ASUN All-Conference Second Team for her sophomore campaign in 2012.
The Boiling Springs, S.C. native currently works in the cardiovascular ICU at Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital. She is also in pursuit of her master's degree from Clemson University, working toward becoming a family nurse practitioner.
McAvoy says she feels like she always knew she wanted to work in the medical field, but her great grandfather, Papa Charles as she calls him, getting sick is what made her specifically want to become a nurse.
"Papa Charles was in the ICU and had heart stints placed, and I went and visited him. His nurse was phenomenal, and interacting with her is what really made me think, 'I want to do this,'" McAvoy said. "Him getting sick, going to see him, and seeing what great care he got is what turned me on to wanting to be a nurse."
When the pandemic hit the United States back in March of last year, Sobotka and McAvoy were not immune to the immediate effects it had on the country. For Sobotka, it delayed the MLB season with questionable plans of returning to play, and the MiLB season was eventually outright canceled.
"We were in spring training when everything shut down, and at the time we didn't know what was going to happen with the season. We figured the major league season would still continue in some way, but the minor league season was up for grabs," Sobotka said. "It was tough. It did affect me personally but not as much as it did all the other minor league guys when the MiLB season got canceled. They only took a pool of 60 guys from each organization, 30 on the major league side, and 30 for the alternate sites as they called it."
In late June, the MLB announced a 60-game season would happen and the Braves would open the 2020 season on July 24. There was another spring training in July with half of the organization in Atlanta and the other half in Gwinnett, home of the Braves' Triple A affiliate, the Gwinnett Stripers. Sobotka was able to spend time between Gwinnett and Atlanta during the season and made four appearances for the Braves.
"It was a crazy year we had between all the travel and COVID-19 protocols, but I'm very thankful the MLB got a schedule put together for us and I think they did a great job with that and the testing protocols," said Sobotka.
As for McAvoy, it became all hands on deck tending to COVID-19 patients at her hospital. Like most medical centers across the nation, Prisma Health Greenville Hospital was shaken by the emergence of the pandemic, and McAvoy was on the frontlines.
"When it all first hit, we didn't have enough supplies. We didn't know how unprepared we were at the beginning, so it was a huge issue," said McAvoy. "We have a floor at Greenville Memorial specifically for COVID-19 patients and I worked on that floor. It was a lot of sadness and death, so that hit me pretty hard personally. I didn't want to go to work a lot of times honestly. In the beginning, I was really nervous about contracting the virus and would have anxiety about it, but once I started taking care of the patients, I felt better about it."
McAvoy explained that she is back to her normal routine on the cardiovascular ICU floor for the most part, though there are some times when she has to get pulled from her regular unit in order to assist the COVID-19 floor.
"Things have gotten a lot better because we figured out how to handle it all," McAvoy said. "We're a lot more prepared and have a lot of protocols in place. We know exactly what we're going to do when we get a COVID-19 patient."
If you were to ask Sobotka and McAvoy about their favorite memories as student-athletes at Upstate, you would get similar answers from both of them: bonding with other student-athletes and the relationships they built.
"The student-athlete community is what I remember most about college. We were all so close to each other and all supported each other. Whether it was going to each other's games or helping each other with school work, we were always there for each other," said McAvoy.
"One of my favorite things was going to basketball games," added Sobotka. "My freshman class came in and took it from not having a student section at all, to by the time we were juniors, we'd have 100-150 students there supporting our basketball team. Seeing the community and bonding we had among all the different sports was awesome."
The couple has the camaraderie and closeness of the student-athlete community to thank for their relationship. However, McAvoy admits that Sobotka wasn't very nice to her when they first met.
"We met freshman year at the dorms. They were doing icebreakers for the freshmen, so my roommates and I met the baseball team. We all just started hanging out, and that's when I met Chad," McAvoy said. "We didn't really talk that much. We saw each other at a party and knew who each other was, but he wasn't the nicest to me when we first met. He likes to say he was, but he really wasn't. As soon as we had our first conversation, I was like 'uhh ew no,' but then we started hanging out more and his friends and my friends got really close so it just kind of went from there and we hit it off."
Sobotka chimed in, "It was kind of just off and on talking, then going to eat at the cafeteria together, having class together, getting treatment together at the Hodge, our friends all hanging out, and after just always being around each other as athletes, our relationship just started to build."
Fast forward to Feb. 1, 2019, a "suspicious" cabin trip, as McAvoy described it.
"Her only request was for her family to be there when I proposed. I got the ring at the end of November," Sobotka said. "Every year her family goes up to Cherokee and rents some cabins around the end of January or beginning of February, so since that was already planned, I thought it might be fun to bring my family up there with her family. I invited my parents, brother, sister, and my grandma flew in from Michigan."
McAvoy interrupted to say, "That's when it got suspicious."
Sobotka tried, however, to cover his tracks. "I tried to keep it a secret, but I knew it was going to be tough. I tried to be all nonchalant about it like 'oh I think my parents might becoming,' but my dad isn't much of a mountain or cabin type guy," he said.
"I knew something was up because his family just started coming, and I was like this is weird because these cabins aren't like nice cabins," McAvoy explained. "My family has been going there ever since I was a baby, so they're not the nicest cabins in the world, and I just didn't picture his family being in that kind of setting. I knew something was weird, but I didn't put it all together."
When the families got to the cabins on a Friday afternoon, the only thing on Sobotka's mind was popping the question, and he knew exactly where he wanted to do it. "I knew the sooner I did it, the better for me because my anxiety was through the roof," he said. "There's a water fall we always go up to and take pictures, but for some reason she didn't want to go on Friday."
"It's because we don't usually go on the Friday we get there," McAvoy interrupted. "It's usually one of the last things we do on the trip, and we had just gotten to the cabin so I didn't want to go yet, but my mom was like, 'no, we're going,' so then I was like okay I guess we're going."
"So we convinced her to go up there. It's probably about a half mile hike and it was icy so I didn't even know if we were going to get my family up there, but we found a way to get up there," said Sobotka. "There's a little bridge going across the waterfall, and I was lucky the waterfall was pretty loud so no one could hear what I was saying. I said my words, she said yes, my brother had some champagne so we had a toast there, and then we went back to the cabin and just kind of celebrated all weekend."
"He told me he wanted me to be part of Team Sobotka," McAvoy added. "I don't remember a lot of it because I was really phased by it all, but I do remember him saying that."
The wedding was originally planned for November 2020 at the conclusion of baseball season. However, after a lot of consideration and factors playing into it, the difficult decision was made to push the wedding back to November 2021.
"With everything that happened with the baseball season and me still being in school, everything just got so stressful. We had already put money down on the venue and they didn't want to give us our money back, so we were just trying to figure out what we could do," McAvoy said.
All of this, along with the fact that family and friends did not feel comfortable traveling from all over the country for the wedding, helped in making the decision. "It was a stress relief to put it off, but at the same time we're a little bummed out," McAvoy added.
These days, Sobotka is preparing to report for spring training this month while McAvoy is completing her master's degree. The couple is set to be married in November of this year.
