This story was excerpted from Christina De Nicola's Marlins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

LOS ANGELES -- The most interesting woman in the world might very well be Donna Hoeing, mother of Marlins right-hander Bryan Hoeing.

She is a retired high school math teacher. She was the only female basketball and baseball coach in the youth leagues of southeastern Indiana. She woodworks. She details cars.

“That's what she likes to do is stay busy,” Bryan said. “Yard work, detailing cars, that sort of thing. Now she goes and touches up cars. She'll notice like a chip on the car, she'll repaint it and do all that stuff.”

Donna -- whose husband, John, passed away in 2000 -- raised Bryan and his older brother, Mike, as a single mother. She never remarried. Though Donna received help from their small town of Batesville, she dedicated all of her time to taking care of her boys, who were 3 and 5 years old at the time.

That meant relinquishing coaching duties for the Batesville High School basketball team after a decade, though Donna continued to coach Bryan and Mike’s youth basketball and baseball teams. She had Bryan compete on Mike’s team since she couldn’t be in two places at once. By seventh grade, Bryan had progressed to travel ball out of Indianapolis, which is about 60 miles northwest of Batesville.

“It's crazy,” Bryan said. “Her world was basically flipped upside down at that point. She had to make a lot of sacrifices, and basically, she was just my father figure and mother figure all in one. She started doing the yard work and mowing the grass and just doing stuff out in the building like making tables and chairs out of the wood, so woodcrafting. She's very good with that type of stuff. And she had to. She had no other choice.”

Before she retired in 2019 after teaching for 32 years, Donna taught pre-calculus, algebra and algebra 2. She was Bryan’s pre-calculus teacher during his junior year, and she had quite the reputation.

“It was like a pretty well-known thing that Mrs. Hoeing's class was pretty intense and scary,” Bryan said. “Like if you weren't paying attention, she was going to call you out and call you up to the board. I definitely had my fair share of call-outs where I seemed like I wasn't paying attention, but I would go up there and answer a question. Her class was very intense. But I think a lot of my classmates and people who I've came up with respected her for that. It wasn't just a class you slacked around in. You had to be focused in that class.”

Donna’s tough love paid off.

Bryan, who is now 27, played collegiately for the University of Louisville before the Marlins selected him in the seventh round of the 2019 MLB Draft. Before he landed on the 15-day injured list with a left hamstring strain last Friday, Bryan had evolved into a high-leverage reliever in his third big league season. Not the biggest fan of flying, Donna watched her son put up zeros on the road in St. Louis and Chicago.

“Throughout the years, she was definitely still hard on us,” Bryan said. “I think that's where the father figure came in. She was not like the whole lovey-dovey type, ‘Oh, I love you so much, son.’ She was very hard on us, because she was still our coach growing up. She had a lot on her plate, and she did a really wonderful job. My brother's doing really well, too. He lives in Chicago now [with] a very successful job. So she did a good job of raising both of us by herself.”