Gloria Toledo can’t live without softball, and right now the Sacramento State softball team can’t live without her.

Sac State coach Kathy Strahan said that Toledo, who was on the bench for the first part of the season as she adjusted to Division I softball, came to her a couple of weeks into the season and asked for a chance to show what she could do.

Strahan told her to “Give me something I can’t live without.”

Toledo did just that.

In one of her first at-bats of the season against causeway rival UC Davis, with a runner on first base, Toledo hit a ball into a gap in the outfield and, as Strahan remembers, “I waved the runner home and I looked up and had to pick my jaw up off the ground.

“(Toledo) hadn’t slowed down and was sliding into third on what would have been a double for the average bear.”

Since then Toledo has been a regular in the starting lineup for Sac State, starting 10 games at second base and 21 at shortstop.

Toledo is hitting .318 with nine runs scored, eight RBIs and two home runs — including one in the Hornets’ last game on Sunday at Portland State — in the last 14 games, a span in which the Hornets have gone 10-4.

“Gloria is a key part of what’s making us go right now,” Strahan said. “She’s had to fight for everything she’s ever had.”

A lifelong athlete who excelled in both soccer and basketball as a youngster, Toledo said that her true passion is softball. When she was 16 years old, her parents divorced and her father, the family’s provider, moved back to his native Nicaragua, putting a strain on her ability to play.

Gloria Toledo, her mother Damariz and brother Harvin were forced to move into a cramped apartment in Castro Valley, 20 minutes away from Fremont and Washington High, where she attended high school and played on the softball and basketball teams.

She said she hasn’t seen her father since visiting him in Nicaragua in December of 2002.”So many things could have happened after the divorce,” Toledo said. “If I hadn’t kept myself busy, I could have easily gone the wrong route.”

Toledo said she remembers having to be at the BART station at 6:30 in the morning every school day in order to take two trains and a bus to arrive at Washington for school at 7:30 a.m. All the while toting around books and binders for school and her softball gear for practice.

“She got a lot more motivated after the divorce,” Harvin Toledo said. “She was more motivated to be a student and worked a lot harder.”

She also had to work weekends at a Chuck E. Cheese’s for spending money, and weekend tournaments with her traveling team, Strike Zone, were becoming more difficult to make.”At that point, playing was just a hassle,” Toledo said. “What normally would have been possible was a burden.”

So she gave it all up.

Toledo’s mind was set on not playing anymore in the summer of 2001 — between her junior and senior years in high school — while she worked.

While working one weekend, Strike Zone coach Todd Bennett came in to see her and persuaded her to play in a fall tournament with the team.

“I think about that all the time,” Toledo said. “I think about what would have happened had he not talked me into coming back.”

Toledo resumed playing with Strike Zone and went on to play her senior year at Washington, earning the school’s Athlete of the Year award.

Without a scholarship offer out of high school, Toledo attended classes at Ohlone College in Fremont in the fall before transferring to West Valley College for the next year and a half.

It was playing in that fall of 2002 for the San Jose Stingers that Toledo drew interest from then-Hornet assistant coach Jennifer Fritz.

“I just played ball because I love it,” Toledo said. “I wasn’t playing to be recruited.

“Once coach Fritz and I were in contact, I did everything I could to make sure I could get my (associates degree) and transfer.”

That included taking classes over the summer and a math class at San Jose City College, 30 minutes away from home — all to ensure eligibility to transfer.

After adjusting to leaving her mother and brother for the first time, Toledo said that she is finally settled in Sacramento, with plans to move in with friends she made through school at the end of the semester.

“I took a while to get used to the fact that I was on my own,” Toledo said. “But now things are where I want them to be.”

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John Parker can be reached at [email protected]