After a record-breaking season, the Yellowjackets star is exploring what else she can do.
Now in her senior year, Riley Laygo ’27 is poised to finish her collegiate career as the best varsity softball player in Yellowjackets history.
If our printing that sounds like too much pressure on her, don’t worry. Pressure fuels Laygo. It gives her purpose. “Bases loaded, two outs, your team’s down, and you come through with a big hit,” Laygo says. “I live for those moments.”
There have been plenty. In 2026, Laygo became the first URochester softball player to be named the National Fastpitch Coaches Association Division III Player of the Year and the first to earn multiple All-America honors. She set nine URochester single-season records, including batting average (.535) and home runs (17), and led the Yellowjackets to the Liberty League championship. Her fielding at first base was nearly flawless.
Laygo has earned a reputation for leaving everything she has on the field. Her coach, Abby Hurley-Martin, has called her “a generational talent.” But there is more to Laygo than softball. “Anyone reading my softball bio would think I’m super serious about softball all the time,” Laygo says. “Honestly, it’s a big part of my identity. But I have another side of me, too.”
The 21-year-old computer science major spent the summer at home in Hacienda Heights, California, much of it immersed in the Persona video game series, in which players balance everyday life with exploring supernatural realms, fighting inner demons, and using magical manifestations of their psyches called “personas.”
Laygo has a few personas of her own. She cooks but favors no cuisine. She’s been experimenting with Korean but enjoys a good New York strip steak, too. She recently joined a running club. She’s not partial to long-distance jogs but joined to meet people outside her softball orbit.
Laygo has also been teaching herself Python with an eye toward programming video games one day. Horror is her favorite genre. Not surprisingly, she thrives on characters who are constantly under pressure.
“I’ve always been very competitive, so I take that competitiveness wherever I go,” Laygo says. “But I’m also just trying to get to know me as more than a softball player.”
“Anyone reading my softball bio would think I’m super serious about softball all the time. But I have another side of me, too.”
What the novelist W.P. Kinsella once wrote of baseball holds true for softball: There is no rule stating that the foul lines diverging from home plate end at the outfield wall. They run on forever, eventually covering all the world in fair territory.
“Coming into college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Laygo says. “So I’m seeing what I like and don’t like and discovering things I’m passionate about other than softball. I’m still figuring it out.”
On the field, though, Laygo has it all figured out. She hopes to lead the Yellowjackets in 2027 to the “Super Regionals,” the round of the NCAA Division III softball tournament that is the precursor to the Women’s College World Series.
Along the way, she would like to earn All-America status—for the third time. After that, she wants to play softball internationally for the Philippines, a country to which she traces part of her heritage. “That’s always been a dream of mine since I was little,” she says.
See what we mean about Riley Laygo and pressure?
This story appears in the fall 2026 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the University of Rochester.
