Coming Through in the Clutch

Nathan Higa’s baseball family has always been there when he needs them – now he gets to return the favor By Victoria Payne and Brooklyn Chillemi

Nathan Higa was a George Fox senior when he got the call no one ever wants to receive. His grandmother had passed away. He was over 2,600 miles from his family in Pearl City, Hawaii, and had no way to get home.

And then, a plane ticket appeared. Elise Trask, the assistant athletic director at the time, and her husband Brent, one of Higa’s baseball coaches, had an emergency fund for students. They used it to fly Higa home.

It wasn’t the first time – or the last – that a baseball community had been like family to Higa. Growing up in Hawaii, he and his brother were raised by their grandparents, who were firm believers in education. His grandfather continued working after retirement to pay for what a scholarship didn’t cover to send Higa to Honolulu’s prestigious Punahou School.

He remembers feeling different – not less than, but left out. “We didn’t have much,” he recalls. “My grandparents always told me: study hard or get a baseball scholarship to go to college on the mainland.”

But focusing on school and staying out of trouble wasn’t easy. “I was all over the place,” Higa says. With his mother struggling with addiction and his father absent, the instability took its toll. His baseball coach noticed and connected him with a counselor.

“They were the first people I ever opened up with and shared that I was having a hard time,” Higa remembers. “Just having someone there to listen and understand helped me manage everything else. I had all of this extra stuff that I didn’t know where it could go, apart from throwing a baseball or breaking a pencil.”

‘Consistent Humans’

A first-generation college student, Higa chose George Fox because, once again, he experienced the love and compassion of a baseball coach. Bruins head coach Kevin Kopple had a unique approach to recruiting. Every week, on the same day, at the same time – 6 p.m. in Hawaii, 9 p.m. in Oregon – he called. He also watched Higa’s games online and texted after.

“He would ask me about home, school and baseball,” Higa says. “He showed up consistently without ever having met me – he saw me. I am attached to consistent humans.”

Although Higa started at George Fox as a biology major, he found himself pulled toward psychology. The calling intensified during his field experience at CARES Northwest at Randall Children’s Hospital in Portland.

The team served children who had reported abuse, and the days felt emotionally draining and seemingly never-ending. One day, desperate for a break, Higa walked up to the front desk and asked the receptionist, “Are we ever not busy?” No, it turned out. They had a waitlist of six months.

Six months. “I look back and think, ‘I would never have run into a counselor like mine in high school if I didn’t go to a fancy private school,’” Higa says. Maybe, he thought, he could help shorten that waitlist for someone else.

When he graduated in 2017, his grandfather – still grieving, afraid to fly alone since losing his wife – was unable to make the trip. Once again, his baseball family showed up, and Kopple attended the commencement in his grandfather’s place. A few months later, Higa began George Fox’s Doctor of Psychology program.

Now a licensed clinical psychologist, working with teens and young adults, Higa has followed through on his belief that everyone should have access to the care they need. As a young therapist in private practice, he went through the painstaking process of becoming paneled with the Oregon Health Plan – a Medicaid program so administratively complex that most private practitioners don’t bother. As a result, he can serve Medicaid patients who might otherwise go without care.

He also supervises advanced doctoral students at Lewis & Clark College whose clients receive care effectively for free. For Higa, doing the unglamorous work to reach the people who need him most is simply part of his calling.

“I’m sitting shotgun,” he says. “I’m here with you for the journey. You get to choose where we go. I might point out some things on the way, but I’m really with you for the ride.”

For Higa, the ride is also an act of faith. “My Christian faith has allowed me to be open-minded – to welcome people in, to hear their story,” he says.

The Guy Who Buys the Gloves

Caring for others isn’t just something Higa does for work. When Coach Kopple called asking alumni to chip in on new gloves for players, it was Higa who stepped up and said yes. He did the math: $500 a month, $6,000 a year. “In my head, it’s a small thing for what I’ve had the opportunity to do at Fox,” he says. “Every month is just my way of saying thank you.”

A baseball glove is one of the most personal pieces of equipment in the sport – broken in over time and shaped until it feels like it belongs on your hand. Each incoming player gets to choose their own color and have their name stamped into the heel. “I never got a new glove in my four years here, and I was really bummed about that,” he says. “I never want someone to feel left out because their family can’t afford the extra thing.”

Maybe Higa didn’t need it, but Kopple let him order his own that first year. Higa felt like a kid again. “I had so much fun,” he says. “It gets to be individually you while also being part of something bigger.”

Higa understands how something as simple as a new glove can foster connection and belonging – feelings he experienced as a George Fox student, and now, as a Newberg resident.

Making his home in town has also come with the blessing of familiar faces. When he and his wife McKenna began researching wedding venues last year, he kept running into an old connection. Trask, who he’d stayed in touch with over the years, always posted pictures of a beautiful farm near the Oregon Garden. As it turns out, her family owned it.

When he and McKenna married at the Farm on Golden Hill last autumn, his baseball family once again came through in the clutch, with Trask officiating the ceremony and Kopple cheering in the crowd. It was, Higa later realized, the first day of fall baseball.

Himself a show-up guy, Higa recently got to meet some of the players who have benefited from his generosity. He kept his introduction simple. “Hi, I’m Nathan,” he said. “I’m the guy who buys your gloves.”