SPOKANE, Wash. -- In Gonzaga's dugout at Patterson Baseball Complex and Coach Steve Hertz Field, a newly-installed plaque hangs on the wall, adjacent to the entrance to the Zags' clubhouse. It's dedicated to the memory of a woman known as Laura Michels, a devoted member of the Sisters of Holy Names with an outsized imprint on the culture of the teams she became an irreplaceable part of.

Superlatives are not uncommon for those describing Sister Laura, who passed in 2018 after giving nearly three decades of her life to the school and a dozen to the baseball team as their chaplain. Her death was tragic in the absence it left in the spaces she inhabited, but not because her time spent was anything but full.

"I am who I am," she said in 2012, describing how players sometimes didn't know how to behave around her initially just because she was a nun. "I'm just an ordinary person."
 
That's true at a superficial level. But no one who knew Sr. Laura would use the word ordinary to describe her.

Born Janice Michels and raised in Spokane Valley, she joined the Holy Names Sisters — a convent with roots in the area dating back 125 years — out of high school, spending the rest of her life in various forms of service. She taught in Seattle for nearly two decades after earning her degree, moving to Gonzaga in 2000 to return to the city she'd known her whole life.

It would take six more years on campus before Michels became a part of the baseball team, but even before, the mutual draw was magnetic. She told head coach Mark Machtolf, her distant relative, that she always kept the team in her prayers; when he asked her to make it official in 2006, he already knew what her answer would be. 

Within two years, she had been asked to join the women's basketball team in the same role, her gifts for working with student-athletes already incredibly apparent.
 
Serving both teams was hardly the end-all, be-all of her time at GU — she coordinated liturgies and retreats for University Ministry, was a chaplain for multiple dorms, led the university's Act Six program, and taught confirmation classes, amongst a litany of other responsibilities.

But looking back now, players and coaches still see something inherently different in what she gave their team in particular. For those associated with the team who knew her, her role transcended any combination of titles: they were simply "her boys". She became indispensable, and Machtolf and his staff insisted she be treated as such. 

"To say her presence was significant would be gross understatement," Machtolf said after her passing in 2018. "Everybody loved her; she brought energy and a smile."

Sr. Laura's place in Gonzaga baseball was one unprecedented and unique to her, and one she embraced with a vigor that belied the fact she was 64 when she first took it. She considered the opportunity a gift in and of itself, later calling it "the dessert part of my job … another place I go to do ministry." 
 
And in the 12 years in between, she embraced the grey area between mentoring and sporting leadership — a relentless optimism coupled with the sagacious perspective of a long-serving woman of God. 

"I want to give them a different look at things," she said in an interview in 2017, a year before her passing. "Not just always the winning part — that is always fun — but there's more to it than that."
 
Sr. Laura's name never ended up in the box scores, but her impact on the program resonates just as strongly as anyone who did. 

"I think that was maybe her biggest gift to the program — what she contributed to our overall culture," said Zags pitching coach Brandon Harmon, who spent time around Michels as both a player and a coach. "And that's something that we take a lot of pride in, trying to create that clubhouse that's inclusive and treat each other as teammates."

Michels made great effort to prepare something for the team before each series — a message, a poem, a prayer, all with some form of a lesson. She had mastered the art of speaking, learning from other nuns over the years, and spent hours formulating her messages, sometimes doing double duty for both women's basketball and baseball when their seasons overlapped. 

And in those moments when it was her turn to address the team, she commanded the undivided attention of thirty-plus people with ease. Players and coaches still clearly remember the total silence that overcame the clubhouse when she spoke.
 
"You could hear a pin drop," said former infielder Jason Chatwood ('09). "She just had everybody locked in. It was like a member of the coaching staff talking, almost."
 
A "baseball junkie," as Machtolf described her, she watched games with the attention to detail of a trained analytical mind. She followed the team closely, even during the longest stretches of road play. Her prayers and poems for the team reflected nuances of on-field performance, and Harmon said players thought she was in kahoots with the coaching staff because of how closely they often correlated. But they weren't. She just knew baseball.
 
"She paid attention to little things, little details that you would think would be easily overlooked," Chatwood said. "It was so impressive when she would talk to you about it.

"And the things that she paid attention to, whether it was during play or not during play or attitudes … I think it really showed you how important the team and how we were doing were to her."
 
But she also balanced that passion with a desire for something more.
 
"Athletic gifts are important," she said in 2012, "But who athletes become because of them is more important."

Games without Sr. Laura in attendance were rare. Home games were unmissable, except for in the most pressing of circumstances. When she had eye surgery in 2012, she informed the team that she would be missing one of their home games, later expressing delighted surprise when players came into her office to see how she was doing.
 
She would travel often when allowed to — conference games all over the west coast, nearby summer league programs in the offseason, even the occasional nonconference road series — just for the opportunity to cheer on GU players. 
 
"I think one of the coolest parts about Sister Laura was that she was always there," said former pitcher Trent Schulte, who graduated in 2019. "It didn't feel like it was her job to be there. It felt like she consistently wanted to be there all the time for us."
 
To her, human connection was a source of energy, and she excelled in cultivating those connections; the kind that, as she described, "opens me up to seeing the beauty in people". A fan of her red cowboy boots, armed with a variety of catchphrases, Michels' wit and gregariousness made that easy, even with those she had just met. 

"I think she made a lot of people feel that way," Harmon said. "I could selfishly say, 'Yeah, she had an amazing relationship with our baseball players,' but I really do believe she had that relationship with a lot of people that she came across."

"She made you feel after interacting with her that you were the most important thing on her agenda that day."
 
Before the beginning of each fall, she'd make sure she memorized every player on the roster — their name, their number, their position and their hometown — ensuring no one was forgotten or left out. She'd often test her memory when meeting new ones, but the moments she couldn't recall everything almost instantaneously were exceedingly rare.

"More than anything, she didn't see us as players like everyone else," Schulte said. "She didn't see us even really as athletes. She just saw us as people that she cared equally about; every single person. Coaches, trainers, all of us."
 
Most members of the clergy say they felt called to devote their lives to the service of God. But there's not as many who felt called to become a team chaplain, and even fewer who lodged themselves so deeply in the collective heart of a program.

"I would listen to the sisters give talks," she told the Gonzaga Bulletin in 2012 of her decision to become a nun. "They would say if it's something that keeps coming back to you again and again in little ways, pay attention to it, because if that's the call that you're meant to have, that's where you're going to be happiest in life."
 
Now, immortalized in the dugout, there for every game, it's impossible to forget about the woman who was happiest as a Zag.