Michele Pavlu, Nauset Trainer Who Helped Steer Cape Baseball Through COVID-19, Stepping Down From League After 20 Seasons

NORTH EASTHAM – Michele Pavlu remembers the first time she saw 100 miles per hour pop on a Cape Cod Baseball League scoreboard.

She was an athletic trainer for Orleans — already seven or eight seasons under her belt — when a Firebirds pitcher hit the triple digits velocity mark in Cotuit. It’s one hard to forget moment for Pavlu across the two decades she’s spent in the Cape League. It’s a memory, too, that perhaps symbolizes how as the ballplayers over time have gotten stronger and faster, the league’s athletic training, under Pavlu’s purview, has worked to keep up.

Pavlu announced after her 20th season working in the Cape League this past summer that she’d be stepping down as athletic training coordinator and assistant medical director, roles she’d held since 2017.

“It was a really hard decision,” Pavlu said. “I love this league. I feel like I've grown up with this league.”

Pavlu, a Brewster resident who’s also been the head athletic trainer at Nauset Regional High School since 2003, won the Richard Sullivan Executive of the Year award in 2021 for helping to guide the Cape League through the COVID-19 pandemic. After the 2020 season was canceled, Pavlu and others “worked tirelessly” creating a document of the league’s pandemic policies and procedures, she said. Baseball returned to the Cape in 2021.

Before and after the pandemic, Pavlu sought to institute more consistent sports medicine care and procedures. In 2022, structured documentation protocols for all 10 Cape teams were put into place. The Cape, according to a statement released by Pavlu announcing her departure from the league, is the only collegiate summer baseball circuit with unified sports medicine protocols, venue-specific emergency action plans and a clinical student athletic training program.

Pavlu had in fact first started to get involved on a league-wide scale in the mid-2010s to help ensure teams’ athletic trainers were protected legally in Massachusetts and that the league was doing what it needed to do to get licensed and insured. She said getting to mentor student athletic trainers and seeing where they go from the stepping stone that is the Cape League was one of her “greatest achievements.”

And before (and even after) she started working as the league’s athletic training coordinator and assistant medical director, Pavlu was also one of those trainers. She started in 2006 with the Brewster Whitecaps, picking up the job through then-Nauset superintendent Mike Gradone, who had been involved with the club since its inception in 1988. 

“We had no policies and procedures, no sports medicine protocols,” Pavlu said of her first season as a trainer. “I maybe wrapped on a handful of ice bags, did a couple emergency care things.”

By the time of Pavlu’s final summer as a trainer with Orleans in 2019, the level of work that went into keeping players healthy and on the field had changed drastically, she said. The collegiate baseball season had lengthened. More was at stake for the players. The trainers conducted multiple treatments a day.

And yet, the experience as an athletic trainer in the Cape League wasn’t all that different from what Pavlu does at Nauset. A college-aged player coming to play baseball for the summer may only be a year or two older than a high school senior. 

Still, athletic training in the league was unique in that Pavlu only worked with players — who came to Massachusetts from all over the country and had their own regular trainers back at school — for two months at most. Trust had to be earned quickly.

“It is such a short period of time where that respect happens and that relationship forms,” Pavlu said.

Building relationships, Pavlu learned, defines Cape Cod baseball. In her role as an administrator, Pavlu saw the league beyond the Orleans dugout. She said the relationships with players, host families, fellow trainers, managers and coaching staffs were one of the best things about the Cape League.

“It's the relationships you build with not only those ballplayers, but the team presidents, the general managers, the volunteers for each program,” Pavlu said. “That was a different side of it that I had never seen before.”

In her several years as a team trainer, Pavlu mostly saw injuries stemming from overuse. But even baseball is no stranger to more traumatic incidents. During her first summer in Brewster, a pitcher took a line drive to the head and was airlifted to Boston for treatment. In Orleans, a player came to Pavlu with his arm swollen and riddled with blood clots. He spent the rest of the summer at Mass General Brigham. Both players pitched again. 

In Pavlu’s announcement that she’d be stepping down, she thanked the women of the Cape League who had paved the way for her. It wasn’t easy being a female in a male-driven profession, Pavlu said, but she had mentors like former league president Judy Scarafile, Orleans general manager Sue Horton and Harwich Mariners president Mary Henderson. Pavlu remembered in particular seeing a picture of Scarafile while visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame when in college.

“To then have a discussion with her during the pandemic about how we can move forward and what my role in the league is and how we can get this off the ground was like [a] full-circle moment from 25 years ago — standing in the Hall of Fame and seeing her picture and then having a conversation with her about what we need to do for the Cape League.”

Pavlu made the decision to step down from the league in order to focus more on her family as well as other professional commitments. Her role at Nauset remains unchanged. She has a daughter in middle school and often felt like she was triple-booked. It was getting harder to maintain everything.

“I started when I was 26 years old, and now [I’m] in my mid-40s,” Pavlu said. “And I've grown professionally as well and want to take what I've done here and move it forward.” 

While she’s excited to not be involved with the league for the first time in over two decades, Pavlu expects to still be around as a fan. She got a text from Whitecaps manager Jamie Shevchik urging her to not spend too much time at Eldredge Park in Orleans but to swing by Brewster as well, she said. No doubt it’ll be fun to catch a game and be able to enjoy it while not on call as a trainer or medical director.

“I've got it into a position where I did what I came here to do,” Pavlu said. “We've built a program. It's consistent across the board, and it's time for someone else to come in and put their own spin on it.”