College Achievers: Siblings, Downers North grads have a day 1,500 miles apart
As if guided by unseen forces, the siblings had a day.
At 3:03 p.m. Saturday, April 11, in the fifth inning of a softball game against Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., Wagner College shortstop Payton Janicki cracked a 2-run home run over the center-field wall.
At 3:35 p.m. that same day in a baseball game at Texas State, Troy University’s Jimmy Janicki, a sophomore catcher who graduated from Downers Grove North in 2024 — two years after his sister — hit a 2-run home run down the left field line.
Watching their son from the stands in San Marcos while streaming Payton’s game online, parents Tami and Jason Janicki sent their daughter a phone message about Jimmy’s home run.
“I go on my phone and my parents sent a picture and they’re crying, so happy, so proud of us,” said Payton Janicki, a team captain at Wagner.
“It was definitely a crazy feeling,” she said of the sibling home runs 32 minutes and 1,500 miles apart.
“It was really a surreal moment for sure.”
Helping Wagner sweep its doubleheader against Le Moyne, Payton Janicki went 2-for-4 with 3 RBI and a run scored in the Eagles’ 4-1 win in the opener.
In Wagner’s 11-1 win in Game 2, she went 4-for-4 with 3 RBI and 2 runs scored. It was her first 4-hit game in college.
Jimmy Janicki went 2-for-4 with a run scored in Troy’s 15-2 Game 1 win over Texas State.
In Game 2 he went 4-for-6 with 3 RBI and 3 runs in the Trojans’ 12-11 win in 11 innings for the sweep. It was his first 4-hit game in college.
“We’ve had similar days, but nothing like what happened on that day. I mean, that was crazy,” Jimmy Janicki said.
A 6-foot-4, 223-pounder who was the honorary captain of the Daily Herald 2024 DuPage County All-Area Baseball Team and played linebacker for Downers North’s Class 7A state football runner-up, Janicki is tearing it up at Troy.
Going into the weekend he led the Trojans with a .340 batting average, 10 home runs, 48 RBI, a .639 slugging percentage and a 1.057 OPS.
Payton Janicki, who had braced her kid brother for the college student-athlete experience while Jimmy helps her with the mental side of the game, has improved each year at Wagner.
Graduating in May with a degree in health science, Payton Janicki has started 149 of her team’s 153 games over four years. This season she is hitting .300 with 7 doubles and 20 RBI.
They don’t subscribe to any cosmic connection that fueled their April 11 home runs — not between each other.
“I think it was definitely some help from up above,” Jimmy Janicki said.
The connection is with their older brother, Nicholas Janicki, who died eight years ago on April 20, at 21.
The death of Nick, a Downers Grove North football player and three-time track and field state qualifier recruited by Southern Illinois University for track, has brought Payton and Jimmy Janicki even closer. Payton Janicki considers them “inseparable.”
“Even our mom and dad — we got way more close to them, just family overall,” Jimmy Janicki said.
“That happened when I was 14 and Jimmy was 12, so that kind of also plays a role in why we play, and we play for him,” Payton Janicki said.
“There’s constant reminders of that, there’ll be little things such as like when we go up to bat and it’s a big moment and we kind of speak it out loud — like a ‘Hey, Nick, help us out here’ type of thing,” she said.
Speaking from Alabama where Troy was hosting a three-game weekend series against Louisiana, Tami Janicki said she and her husband have designed their schedules to enable 12 straight weekends of travel, and counting, to watch her children’s college games.
She attributed that to Nick. His loss instilled the importance of grabbing opportunity while able.
On April 11 it all came together.
“We probably definitely got some help from up above,” Jimmy Janicki said. “My brother, all our loved ones we have up there. So that definitely played a part. And then we just kind of let our talent do the work.”