Bats: R Throws: R
Height: 5’4’’
Catcher
School: Wisconsin Lutheran College
Milwaukee Brewers Intern - International Scouting, painter, musician
I. Oikos (οἶκος) - Family, home, roots.
Before Maddie Votsis ever thought about scouting reports, national teams, or international tournaments, baseball wasn’t introduced to her - it was already part of the household. Her father played the game growing up, playing in college. So when it came time to choose a sport, the decision wasn’t framed as a question of potential or what was attractive- it was a given. “My dad played baseball growing up. He played in college too. So it kind of just came naturally for my parents to decide to put me in the same sport as my dad,” she said. “It’s kind of a family love.” Maddie grew up with a younger brother, two years younger than her. Games didn’t end when practice did, they followed her home. “He’s two years younger than me,” she said. “So we were always competitive.” She first picked up a bat and ball at four years old, playing tee-ball and in a local league with the boys. What felt ordinary then was quietly preparing her for what came next.
Maddie eventually transitioned into softball, “I’ve been a catcher since I was about ten years old,” she said. “So that’s about 12, going on 13 years of experience behind the plate.” Growing up, size wasn’t part of the conversation yet. Everyone was small and felt equal. Later, that would change. But in those early years, what mattered most was repetition, learning, and having fun. From there, the pattern held. Travel ball. High school. College. Aging out only when the structure ended, not because the desire waned. Even now, after graduating earlier this year, she’s still playing. Consistency and routine matter, it explains why baseball and softball never felt like phases or stepping stones. They were constants, a place where strategy, numbers, movement, and discipline converged. “It’s such a strategy-based sport,” she said. “I really love analytics. Those numbers mean a lot to me.” The blend of the physical and the analytical didn’t appear later when she was hired by the Brewers. A process that included interning for the Brewers Community Foundation prior to her present scouting position. Obviously, it was all present from the beginning.
I asked her what sparks her baseball passion- “The first thing is the fact that I played and I know more about it than any other sport. It’s something that I can appreciate as I’ve grown older, as I played higher levels, as I played internationally. Baseball is such a strategy based sport, and I’m somebody who really loves strategy, who loves analytics, who scored very high on math tests, so those numbers, those statistics means a lot to me. In baseball and softball, it’s heavily strategy, statistic based, and we can use those numbers to help us determine our strategy to go against other teams. That’s something that I did at the collegiate level, that’s something that I’m doing right now internationally for Team Greece, and that’s also something that I’m helping to do right now in my internship with the Brewers.” she said. Through that work she has seen how global the game is, with people playing everywhere, even in places you wouldn’t expect. Something she finds especially beautiful.
I, myself, have paid the most attention to international baseball and softball than ever lately. The level of play is real, and the game feels different and refreshed. Watching players who didn’t grow up with it fall in love with it, incorporate their culture, and make it their own is incredible. As I finish up a blurb on international ball, Maddie chimes in, “I think it’s really cool, infusing the culture into the strategy, typically American baseball teams are a lot more power based, they hit a lot more home runs. But look at Japan and their national baseball team, there’s a lot more shifty strategy, small ball games, stealing more bases, etc. The baseball that is in Korea is a lot different than the baseball than they play in the Dominican Republic. It’s really cool to see the culture be respected and involved in their game along with the nuances.”
And what does style of gameplay does she prefer? “Oh, I’m a small ball fan. It’s like the softball I played, I do most of my scouting in the Japan area and I have a lot of experience both watching and playing that way.”
Somewhere in the middle of all this, there’s another layer to Maddie that’s easy to miss if you’re only watching the highlights. She’s been doing independent study in Japanese - online courses, self-guided work. Not to be fluent, but to be functional. Enough to research players, understand baseball-specific language, and navigate information most people never see.
II. Agon ( Ἀγών) - The struggle, the proving ground.
When Maddie reached college, everyone was good, everyone had numbers, and size. At 5’4’’ she didn’t fit into the traditional catcher mold, she was aware and was reminded of it by others. She still pushed through. “I wouldn’t necessarily consider my size a weakness at all, it’s just something that meant I have to work a little bit harder... So just identifying those other areas and pouring all of my effort and my passion into that...” She broke her program’s (Wisconsin Lutheran College) single-season caught-stealing record. She did the work, she produced. And yet, the response she looked for didn’t materialize in the way she expected. The disconnect wasn’t about work ethic or preparation. It was about fit, the growing sense that who she was as a player didn’t align with what others wanted her to be. It wasn’t dramatic in the moment, but a realization that effort and outcome don’t always speak the same language. “That really stung,” she said. “If this isn’t enough,” she remembered thinking, “then I don’t know what else I can do.” That kind of break doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in small ways, cracks in confidence, questions without clear answers, the sense that you’re pushing but not moving forward. “I didn’t know where to take my training,” she said. This is the part of the story most athletes recognize, even if they never say it out loud. The moment when performance stops feeling like proof. When validation becomes something external. When that happens, the struggle isn’t physical- it’s mental, it’s internal. “Sometimes you just need to hear something from somebody else,” Maddie said. That moment was closer than she realized.
We jump into her international experience and how it has helped, shaped, and emboldened her, especially as a Brewers scout. I ask... How has your experience as an international athlete shaped the way you think about scouting, player development, and evaluation? Do you find yourself applying what you’ve learned firsthand when you’re looking at other players? She quickly states “Definitely. There’s a big difference between watching international play and actually being on the field. When you experience it as a player, you really see how different styles- like aggressive base running by the Czech Republic or bunting in Japan - are tied to culture, not just skill.”
We touch on the landscape of women’s roles in sports. I was curious, and I inquire on how many woman scouts she sees and interacts with. “It’s not a lot.” she states, “there is a very, very small handful of women, exactly how many I’m not sure, but it’s like you can count it on less than both of your hands. In our office, the highest concentration of women is in international; Latin America, Europe- we have female scouts, and domestically in the U.S., we have one female scout. I can’t really speak for other organizations, since I don’t have that firsthand experience. At a huge domestic scouting event recently, there were maybe five other women out of, I would say, over 60 scouts. I looked at them and they stood out, it was cool. I would say, I’m like you, this makes me proud. It’s like, look at you, I can totally understand. It’s really awesome.”
From my perspective, what stands out is that women in baseball and softball aren’t just doing the same work, they’re often doing it while navigating challenges men never have to consider. The skills are the same, the intelligence is the same, but the path isn’t. That’s what makes it especially meaningful when women like Maddie break through: not because they’re different, but because they’ve had to overcome invisible hurdles just to be given the same chance. Seeing women succeed despite those obstacles is something she finds deeply meaningful. “It’s really inspiring to me whenever I see other women do it too.”
III. Nikē (Νίκη) - Victory
Arete (Ἀρετή) - Excellence
Affirmation didn’t come as expected, it unknowingly came from a thought, an idea, a reach perhaps? We bring Team Greece into the story. Maddie explains how it happened, “It all started my senior year of high school in, 2020-2021, around that time, that’s when they had the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. That’s kind of how I started thinking about it, was that I saw softball being represented in the Olympics. I was thinking all of these wonderful countries out there playing this beautiful game, on such a stage, wait... does Greece have a team? They’re not represented in the Olympics right now. Do they exist? Is that something? I did a quick Google search, out of curiosity do they have a team? And I saw yes, that’s interesting! So I did a little bit more of research and looked at the roster, I did a little bit of internet stalking” she says laughingly, “and I looked up all the girls, what does it take, what type of players are they, as well as some video of them playing. I got thinking, maybe I can’t do this now, but I think I can get good enough to do this. I think I can see myself as a teammate of these girls, in the future. Like, I don’t want to sound crazy but, look, I might be able to. I was like, well, we all want to go out and win...”
Maddie sent the normal communications out to Greece’s coaching staff. “I wrote up a quick email, it was saying who I am, what college I had committed to, and what my stats are, I also sent him a YouTube link to see me play. It was a shot, I thought he had better things to do than respond to me, he gets tons of emails like this. Well a couple weeks later, he basically said, He’d done some research into me, he’s interested in learning a little bit more about me as a person, and learning a little bit more about my Greek heritage, because something that I need to compete with the team internationally is a Greek citizenship. I need to be a citizen of Greece.” Team Greece wasn’t just an opportunity to play, it was an unforeseen answer. An invitation that didn’t ask her to change shape, herself, or explain who she was as a player. It asked her to be exactly who she was. Maddie had to go through a documentation gauntlet. Securing 100 year old documents about her father’s father, which was no easy task, she found out during the process that some critical documents were lost in a church fire years ago. A background check was required and an official interview held at the Greek Consulate in Chicago, IL. “I did that in May of last year, they tested my knowledge on Greece, the culture, why I want to become a citizen. It’s very similar to the American citizenship interview. I studied for a long time for that. I was super nervous, but as soon as it was done, I felt so relieved it was over, that was definitely the hardest part. While all that was going on, I also, of course, continued training, working on skills, playing in college. I continued to update my channels with videos of me playing and I sent that to the coaches so that they could stay updated. And then, December of 2024, I went down to Houston, Texas to officially try out for the Greek National team. That was something put on between new girls who want to try out and also to play with the established girls, who were there to help the new girls integrate well, and to assist in who the team keeps. This is something that I wanted, you know, and it was something in which I performed well in. It was about a week long tryout - 9 a.m to 4 p.m. every day. I was just practicing, it was definitely a commitment. When it came to a close, I was pulled aside by the head coach and I was told, I had it, I had my spot on the team. Years of effort and and going through the citizenship was something that is definitely really big for me.”
We went back to the moment, the first game. I wanted to know what she remembered seeing, hearing, and feeling as the team stood on the foul line during the anthems. “I think the entirety of just making it to that first game. That was just something so special to me, and it really didn’t sink in until the moment that I was down on the field. I look up and I saw my dad standing about 10 rows up taking pictures of me, and I thought to myself, I’ve never seen my parents watching from so far away before. They’re always, right there in a lawn chair or right behind home plate. And now he’s all the way up there and he had to sit there to get a picture of me. And I’ve never had that before, and it made me think, this world is bigger than the world that I’ve been living in.”
“Getting my name called, staring at the players on the foul-line, staring at the Greek flag and hearing the Greek national anthem. Being able to hear the anthem played while with my teammates as the Czech Republic stood on the other side of the field, I almost had tears in my eyes because my heart just felt tight, not in a way that I was nervous, but in a way that it felt like being hugged. I felt overwhelmingly connected to the country that is in my blood. It’s something that my dad is, it’s something that my grandparents are, it’s something that my whole family is connected to, and to be able to represent that after so many generations of being separated from actually being in that country is something special. I kept thinking to myself, I hope my grandfather’s proud of this, I hope my great grandfather’s proud of this. I hope all of the family that I’ve never met that’s across the sea is proud of this, even if they don’t know me. I hope that they feel it, because that’s something that I felt. I was overwhelmed with a sense of calmness.” This wasn’t about winning medals or box scores. It was about belonging, about being seen not as a projection, but as a contributor. Not as “almost”, but as enough. The weight she felt wasn’t pressure. It was connection, to her family, to her heritage, and to a country she carried on the front of her jersey. “I could feel a whole country believing in me.” Maddie said. That sense of clarity carried forward. It reshaped how she understood her place in the game not just as a player, but as a student of it.
Her path into scouting didn’t happen in spite of softball. It was a direct result of it. Having played at a high level makes it easier to evaluate players across baseball and softball. The fundamentals translate, movement patterns, sequencing, and mechanics even when the games look different on the surface. There are nuances, especially with pitching, but understanding what “right” looks like allows her to identify transferable skills quickly and contribute meaningfully. Years behind the plate taught her how to read movement, anticipate decisions, and manage space. Time navigating doubt taught her how to see past surface-level evaluations. What once felt like a grind became preparation. Victory, in this sense, wasn’t deafening, it was a steady culmination.
How does Maddie deal with the pressures of scouting, playing, training, living life, and the pressures of college before graduation? Art. “Art is really relaxing for me. I’m a very methodical person, and that carries into my painting and drawing, paying attention to every small detail. That same focus shows up in other parts of my life too, and I know it started with art. When things feel heavy - whether it’s softball, school, or life - sitting down to create helps me slow everything down.”
I think we all can relate to that, losing yourself in something you love to do. It also provides a step away from the everyday mundane grind. Maddie’s identity is not that of just a softball player, she has other passions so she can put the athletic part of her away for a while and just exist.
Maddie’s five favorite baseball movies:
Moneyball- due to the industry she is in and the familiarity.
The Sandlot
The Sandlot 2
The Sandlot 3
Ace of Diamonds- not a movie (Japanese anime), but we’ll let it slide.
Catch Maddie playing near Milwaukee Wisconsin of the Land o’ Lakes League with the Queen of Diamonds organization when she’s not practicing her Japanese, binge watching anime, or shredding on her bass guitar.