SAN MARCOS – Melissa Elliott's career with the Palomar College softball team is both a long shot and the most natural thing in the world. It's an option of last resort and a dream come true.

Elliott, a freshman outfielder for the Comets, is a rarity. Despite her standout softball résumé, her name appears nowhere in the San Diego CIF record book. Elliott never competed for a league championship and never wore her jersey to class on game day.

Home-schooled through Escondido's Christian Life Academy until last fall, Elliott didn't have a high school team to join. Instead, she honed her skills as a member of the San Diego Rowdies club program.

It wasn't until former club teammates Shawna Barrow and Alex Hutchinson, who are now Palomar teammates, sang her praises that Elliott made her way onto head coach Scia Maumausolo's radar screen.

“A few of the girls had played travel ball with her,” said Maumausolo, who met Elliott at a high school tournament where Elliott was rooting on some of her club teammates. “Getting to know her, she was a great athlete and a great person.”

For Elliott, the thought of joining the 22-time Pacific Coast Conference champions was almost too good to be true.

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to come to Palomar to play softball here,” she said. “They've always been a very good program and a very good team. I looked their stats up online and kept up with them. It was my dream.”

All the same, when she reached her senior year of high school, Elliott had her eye on a scholarship to a four-year college. When Concordia University in Nebraska was the only program that came knocking, it was a windfall for Comets softball and a chance for Elliott, who plans to be the first in her family to earn a college degree, to pursue her dreams.

“(Palomar) was a dream that I hoped would happen,” she said, “but it was also my backup plan.”

Maumausolo says her program, which has been winning titles since before any of its current players were born, relies on stories like Elliott's.

“If your dream doesn't come through, (Palomar) isn't that much of a step down,” she said. “We have one of the highest transfer rates in the state. In the long run, we can hopefully say it helped the program. (Elliott) is a great team player.”

An ornamental horticulture major (think florist), Elliott said she has been adjusting to attending classes in a traditional school environment.

“It's pretty much exactly the way I imagined it to be,” she said. “I wasn't used to having so much homework. Time management was the biggest transition for me. Other than that, it wasn't too much of a change. The first day, the nerves went away once I started to work, and I was totally fine.”

As for her first day in the Comets uniform, more than a decade of waiting did nothing to diminish the wonder.

“It definitely gave me the honor and history of Palomar softball, being able to wear the uniform finally after being a little girl and saying, 'Man, I want to play for them one day,' ” she said. “It was an amazing experience to be out there on the field with my teammates, looking stunning in our uniforms. It was just amazing.”

With every season, Palomar's title streak grows longer, and with every title, the pressure mounts to repeat.

At almost a quarter of a century, the winning streak itself is an institution, with each title year commemorated on the Comets' scoreboard in right-center field.

Now, one of the program's biggest fans is a vital cog. After watching the streak grow year by year, Elliott said she relishes the chance to hang another title banner.

“They worked so hard to win those conference titles,” she said. “To have it on me is a huge challenge, and I like a challenge. It's a big honor to look up there and know that I'm a part of it.

“I'm a part of what makes the past the present.”

Here's to a dream deferred.

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