April 2025 ~
Susan Weitzel Davis (Jackson, 1978) seemed destined to be a star softball player, but destiny sure took its bloody time figuring that out.
She was born into a family that included three athletic older brothers and a father who was one of the great pitchers of the fast-pitch Portland Softball Association. Dick “Whitey” Weitzel was known for his wicked changeup, the results of which included more frustrated hitters than you could wave a bat at and, eventually, a hamburger on the Erv Lind Stadium concession menu that bore his name.
Whitey’s daughter probably couldn’t have shed the influence of her DNA and family environment had she tried, but that was of no concern to Davis. She loved the game.
“I was at the park a lot watching Dad, and I learned how to be competitive at a young age,” Davis remembers. “I loved softball and always wanted to pitch, and he worked with me and helped me a lot.”
What didn’t help Davis at all was the lack of opportunities young girls had to play the sport. As a grade schooler she was able to play for the Lake Oswego Lakettes team. But once she got to Jackson, Davis’s pursuit of her softball destiny got put on hold until the Oregon Schools Athletic Association finally sanctioned the sport. That didn’t happen until her junior year, and by then Davis had filled the hole in her competitive spirit with gymnastics.
“When I was in sixth grade, we moved from north Portland to the southwest area where my parents found a gymnastics program at a community center because I wanted to do something athletic,” Davis remembers. “That’s where I started learning the sport. Once I got to Jackson, I was coached by Doug Hill, who was a phenomenal coach and motivator who worked with me year-round.”
Though she competed all-around, Davis specialized in the vault and floor. “I did balance beam and bars, too, but the beam was hardwood at the time, and it was sort of scary. But I always pushed myself and I went to summer camps and I just learned through the development and guidance of coaches. I didn’t do too bad.”
What Davis humbly calls not too bad included four gymnastics letters, being named 1st Team All-PIL vaulter as a sophomore and making the second team as a junior. Then as a senior vaulter competing with just two other teammates in the state championship meet, Davis helped Jackson to a third-place finish.
“The fact that there were just three of us and we were still able to take third was pretty cool,” she says.
Especially cool considering that, compared with other competitors, Davis came late to gymnastics and was doing a lot of self-learning early on. She references this in her Hall of Fame bio when she notes that, after that state meet, Coach Hill told her she was “probably the only high school gymnast in the state meet, meaning a gymnast who learned everything in high school and did not practice with a club.”
Davis says gymnastics was far more than just something to keep her preoccupied while she wasn’t playing softball.
“It’s a tough sport, but I loved it,” she says. “I loved the fact that my body was able to do the things I was asking of it. I could vault, do Tsukaharas (a specific vault) and fly through the air. I loved the floor routine, which was part dance, but mostly about athleticism. I honestly don’t know of any other sport where you have to be in the shape you’re in to be a gymnast. I loved performing in front of people, being in the gym with coaches and teammates. It was all just kind of a high.”
As was softball once Jackson was finally able to field a girls softball team. On the diamond, Davis played both at third base and on the mound, where she employed, among other pitches, the mean change-up she learned from her dad.
“The change-up worked well; I was decent enough that I think I scared some of the batters,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t do too bad considering it was a sport being played in high school for the first time.”
Again with the humble thing. For softball, Davis’s version of “not too bad” includes being honored as a senior pitcher on the 1st Team All-PIL West Division team.
Lest anyone think all her influences came from Dad, Davis also gave cheerleading a shot for a year. Her mother, Marilyn, had cheered for Washington High. “It turned out not to be my vibe at the time,” says Davis, who also was Jackson’s May Queen on the school’s Rose Festival Court and spent a year running hurdles and the short relays for the Raider track team.
It was all more than enough to earn Davis her 2023 induction into the PIL Hall of Fame, an honor she treats, unsurprisingly, with trademark humility.
“I never expected it, and I really didn’t know how to take it in,” she says. “I was just so honored and humbled to be in the company of so many folks who I feel have accomplished so much more than me.”
With her high school days behind her, Davis enrolled at Linfield, which didn’t offer gymnastics but did have softball. She played for a year that ended tragically when three of her teammates were killed in a car accident.
“After that, it was just too hard for me to continue, so I decided I needed to come home,” she says.
Back in Portland, Davis enrolled at Portland State where she competed one year in gymnastics, specializing again in vault.
“I did go to nationals with the team, but I wound up injuring myself. At that point decided I didn’t want to continue. I was done.”
Done as a player maybe, but in every other way Davis was just getting started. While at PSU, she had reconnected with an acquaintance from high school. They stayed in contact and a couple years later she and her friend, Derek, wound up at the same Fourth of July party, where they decided they should try dating.
“The rest is history,” Davis says.
The couple married in 1982 and raised two daughters, Rachel and Megan, who were both avid softball players, which put both Davis right back in the middle of the action.
“Derek and I worked a lot with both girls,” Davis says. “Our oldest daughter, Rachel, was a pitcher and Megan was a shortstop, so we coached them through Little League and ASA softball. We pretty much built our lives around the girls playing softball all the way through high school.”
Davis had taken a job at Kellogg Middle School when her daughters were students there. During that time, in 2000, she got a call from a former Jackson counselor named Toni Hunter, who was now Grant High’s principal.
“Toni said, ‘Hey, what do you think about coaching cheer?’” Davis remembers. “I said, ‘Cheer? Me? Toni said she knew about my gymnastics background and said gymnastics were part of competitive cheer and she thought I’d be good at it. So, I decided to give it a shot.”
After getting through a “huge learning curve” that led to a “rough couple of years,” Davis built the Grant competitive cheer team into a perennial state qualifier over the course of 16 years, leading one of her coed teams to a fifth-place finish one year.
Though coaching cheer was essentially a year-round job, Davis also coached softball and gymnastics at Grant while working in several administrative departments. She served as head coach of the Grant junior varsity softball team for several years before moving up to varsity and assisting head coach Debbie Englestad for five years.
“I had a lot of people at Grant tell me I should be a teacher,” Davis says. “But I’ve been working in schools for 24 years and a coach is not just a coach. I’m also a teacher and a friend and a guidance counselor and more. It’s been really good.”
Davis coached at Grant until 2022 when she moved to Franklin to help husband Derek, the junior varsity coach there for 17 years while he was still coaching. He retired from work in 2023. On June 30, Davis will do the same and start working on the next chapter in her story.
When she leaves Grant, where she’s also in the hall of fame in recognition of her community service efforts, the school will have one additional hole to fill. For the last 13 years, Davis has run Grant’s Rose Festival program, yet another activity that, to borrow her words, she’s been “not too bad” at.
“The first year I ran the program, Grant had the Rose Festival Queen, and the second year, we had the queen again,” she says proudly.
Not too bad at all.
Do you know Susan Weitzel Davis? If you’d like to reconnect, she can be reached at [email protected]
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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