 Juliane Steiner throws to first after fielding a grounder at shortstop. |
 Alex (left to right), Micah (6 months), Tatiana (4), and Julianne (Steiner) Kozel. The bird on Juliane's shoulder is a Blue Fronted Amazon. |
by Carol Duerksen
Ask Juliane (Steiner) Kozel to recall the highlights of her years at Hesston College, and she can’t find the words. “I’m sitting here with all these great images and different people passing through my head,” she says from her home in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “I can’t really put them down because it cheapens them. I can’t make them sound as good as the experience really was.”
Hesston College was not Julie’s first choice. As a star softball player at Central Christian High School, Kidron, Ohio, she had dreams of playing for a Division I school, but a serious injury her senior year dashed those hopes.
“I went to Hesston mainly because Woody (Coach Forrest Miller) was really persistent and I was getting no serious responses from anywhere else. I wasn’t appealing because of my injury, but I felt like Woody was willing to take the risk I would recover and be a positive addition to the team. At the time, I had no idea how happy I would later be with that decision,” she said.
“I got a second chance at Hesston. And even though I never fully returned to the player I had been before, I needed to come back and struggle through a hard recovery so that I could keep being active from then on out. If I had stopped playing after my injury, I don’t know if I would have been able to return to an active lifestyle. It was my last hurrah as far as team sports go and we had a really good time.”
The “really good time” for Julie included being part of a team that qualified to compete in the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) Division III national tournament in 2000, and being named a second team All-American for NJCAA Division III following that season. And, while giving her a great opportunity to play softball, Hesston was also preparing Julie for next steps in her life.
“I was able to test the waters at Hesston College,” she said. “I had no idea what I wanted to do in college (besides play softball) and at Hesston that was okay. So I tried a bunch of different things out, and it wasn’t until I decided to finish later on that I realized how important that was to me. I also became a much better student during my time at Hesston. I discovered what I was good at and what things grabbed my attention.”
After Hesston, Julie married Alex Kozel, and in 2005 she completed a degree in fine art photography and sculpture from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. They live in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with their two small daughters and work at Stansberry Children’s Home and Daycare, an organization that works with orphaned and abandoned children as well as at-risk families.
“I have yet to find a softball diamond in Bolivia,” she says. “But I’m okay with that. I learned from my experience with Hesston that it’s not until God gets us to where he wants us that we are challenged to grow in every aspect of our lives.”