Duck Hodges Helped Coach Lainey Wilson Up For Her First Pitch Throw At Colorado Rockies Game: “Thanks Coach Duck”

MLB

Guess it doesn’t hurt to have your former-footballer-fiancé hand out a few tips on the throwing motion.

To put things simply, Lainey Wilson is one of the busiest country music artists in the world. Her most recent album, Whirlwind, is fittingly named. That’s what her life in the music industry has been like as of late, and Wilson’s personal life also got busy earlier this year when she and her long-time boyfriend, Devlin “Duck” Hodges, finally got engaged:

Lainey Wilson even using her song “4x4xU” as a clever caption for their engagement announcement.

The couple dated for around four years before getting engaged. They kept their relationship a secret for quite a while before finally walking the red carpet together at the ACM Awards back in 2023. And it was an interesting dynamic… Lainey Wilson was a rising country music star, and Duck Hodges’ was a football player who’s career was slowly coming to a close.

Duck was a four-year starter at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama before being signed as an undrafted free agent by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2019. He was named the starter during the 2019 season when Mason Rudolph went down with an injury, going 3-3 as a starting quarterback before being waived by the Steelers and signed to the practice squad prior to the 2020 season.

In 2022, after bouncing around the NFL a bit more and even playing a handful of games in the CFL (Canadian Football League), Hodges officially retired from the sport. Thus, his athletic career was officially over. And considering his fiancée Lainey Wilson was recently asked to throw out the first pitch at a Colorado Rockies game, I guess you could say her athletic career is just getting started.

If you are a celebrity and you get asked to toss out the first pitch, you want to be able to get up on the mound and throw a strike. Luckily for Lainey Wilson, she has someone that’s now built into her life that knows a thing or two about throwing a ball. Duck might have been more of an expert in the football throwing motion, but he’s still knowledgeable on the art of the baseball throw.

So before the country star threw out the first pitch, she got a little help from her soon-to-be husband:

“Coach Duck.”

Couple goals.

Lainey Wilson even left a comment underneath Hodges’ post about the first pitch practice session, and hilariously gave her fiancé a hard time:

“Surprised you didn’t make me run bases. Thanks Coach Duck.”

Coach Duck did have Wilson throw plenty of warm up pitches though, as you can see in the video below:

As for the actual, official pitch that Lainey Wilson threw to kick the Rockies game off, the “Heart Like A Truck” singer was juuuust a bit outside. She bounced it just shy of home plate, but to her credit, Wilson did wind-up from just in front of the pitcher’s mound. That’s a lot farther than most people think… so I’d say all of the practice that she had with her fiancé paid off.

Take a look: