Photo gallery for Zeeland's Kraai part of a new team now

By GARY BROWER
myZeeland Staff

Katie Kraai may have left her athletic career behind when she graduated from Ferris State University in May, but the Zeeland High School graduate is still part of a hard working team.
Kraai, after finishing her stellar senior season with the Bulldogs softball team, began working as a nurse in the emergency room at Spectrum Health Butterworth Campus in Grand Rapids at the beginning of June.
On the job for just more than a month, Kraai sees the parallels between her career on the softball field and her career after softball.
“There is definitely a teamwork kind of aspect to the emergency room and health care in general,” said Kraai, 22. “Everyone works together toward the same goal.”
Kraai worked part-time at Zeeland Community Hospital — where her mother Patricia is also a nurse — during her senior year at Ferris. She was offered a job by her hometown hospital, but turned it down for the opportunity to work at Spectrum, where she felt she would get a more well-rounded nursing experience.
“Spectrum has a higher acuity of patients and I wanted to get more experience with that,” Kraai said, meaning that the ER at Spectrum, on average, sees patients requiring a greater degree of care than those in Zeeland.
Kraai has never been one to back down from a challenge, a trait that helped transform her from a lightly recruited high school player to one of Ferris State’s most decorated softball players.
Her four years at Ferris were a study in dedication as Kraai worked diligently to balance the demands of a collegiate athletic career with the requirements of a rigorous academic program. She handled both with great aplomb and finished as an Academic All-American and a NCAA Division II All-Region and second team All-GLIAC honoree.
The latest of a multitude of postseason honors was bestowed on Kraai last week when she was named a Commissioner’s Award winner for spring sports by the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The award, given to only six male and six female athletes in the fall, winter and spring, is handed out to scholar athletes who excel on the field of play and in the classroom.
Kraai graduated cum laude from Ferris and, as a third baseman, helped the Bulldogs win conference and regional championships this spring and earn the school’s third berth in the Division II National Championship Tournament. Ferris finished tied for fifth.
“It was definitely a lot of work because we had to do some compromising between my coaches an my teachers to make everything work,” Kraai said. “To make it to all my classes and my games, we just had to compromise.”
For Kraai, that meant making up for missed class work and rescheduling clinical time, but she never compromised her effort on the field.
Kraai started every game of her career at Ferris as the Bulldogs’ third baseman. She finished as the school’s career leader in doubles (49) in 202 games and led the Bulldogs into three NCAA Division II regional tournaments.
Kraai was a two-time (2005 and 2007) National Fastpitch Coaches Association Scholar-Athlete and earned 2008 ESPN The Magazine/CoSIDA Academic All-District IV Softball First-Team honors. A three-time (2006-08) GLIAC All-Academic Team pick, Kraai was the recipient of Ferris State’s 22nd annual Helen Bennett Award as the school’s most outstanding female student-athlete.
“We finished fifth in the nation. It was nice to finish my career close to the top,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting all the awards. They just kind of came.
“Academically and in athletics, this year was definitely my best season personally and our best season as a team.”
Kraai was Ferris State’s only senior this season and her steady, understated leadership played a major role in the Bulldogs’ run to the national tournament. She drove in the team’s only run in the regional championship game, a 1-0 victory over Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, the defending national championship.
It was the highlight of Kraai’s career.
“Winning regionals this year is definitely what stands out,” she said. “We went the whole regional tournament without letting anybody score on us and then we beat the defending national champion in the final game.
“It felt good to beat a team that won the nationals.”