957 Strikeouts : Lady Vikings’ Pitching Star Will Have to Tame Her Wild Arm for College Competition

When the fireballing Lisa Hardy took the mound for Santa Monica High this season, most hitters were greatly overmatched.

“She can really throw that pill,” her father Roland said.

The problem is, she doesn’t always know where the ball is going.

While amassing enough strikeouts to stand third on the California Interscholastic Federation all-time list (957), the 17-year-old senior also threw a disturbing number of wild pitches and walked a lot of batters.

So, it was no shocker that one of the two runs she allowed in a playoff loss to Hacienda Heights Wilson to close her high school career was because of a wild pitch. And she walked seven.

Hardy summed up the focus of her task in preparing for her next step, collegiate competition, with one word: “concentration.”

Concentration enabled Hardy, the leadoff hitter, to win the most outstanding player award in the Ocean League this year and her team MVP for three consecutive seasons. Concentration also helped her hurl 11 no-hitters and 16 one-hitters in her high school career. It was concentration that enabled her to strike out 21 St. Monica batters in a game last season.

But that was high school, where she could usually blow away batters. If she pitches for West Point as planned, it could be a different story.

Hardy, who started pitching only four years ago after being a shortstop in a Bobby Sox league, is regarded as a talented athlete who needs to put all the pieces together to make herself a complete college player.

What does that mean?

Ask her pitching coach, Armando Madrid, and he’ll mention mental humps Hardy will have to overcome.

“She’s finally starting to realize what she’s doing right, what she’s doing wrong,” Madrid said. “Now she uses her head, while before she would just throw the ball.”

Madrid discussed one game last summer in which he thought Hardy wasn’t using her head.

“I saw her in a Thousand Oaks tournament. She threw two rise balls and the hitter missed them by a foot. Then she started to toy with the hitter, throwing pitches outside. I chewed her out for that.”

That’s nothing new. Madrid, formerly a pitching coach at Cal State Northridge who met Hardy last summer, said he has crammed a lot of things into her head to prepare her for collegiate competition. He admits he has been extra hard on Hardy.

“Starting at 14 or 15 is pretty old for a softball pitcher,” Madrid said. “She’s way ahead of other kids who started at 14 or 15. It can be done, but it’s tough, and that has hampered her. So many mechanics, so many little things. Where (the hitter) is in the box. Is she swinging at the ball late? Early? Over it? Under it? One little wrong thing can create a lot of other things. It’s a lot to put on a kid.”

To make up for lost time, Hardy is playing for the Torrance Lightning, a team playing in summer tournaments sponsored by the Amateur Softball Assn. While facing high school and junior college talent in Southern California, Hardy’s team may be playing two or three games a day.

“It’s not going to get any easier in college,” Madrid added. “Mentally and physically she’s going to have to get a little tougher and a little smarter. It’s going to be a big challenge.”

And West Point apparently wants to make sure Hardy is aware of that. She said she’s received pamphlets from the Military Academy advising her to stay in shape.

Hardy can be hard on herself.

“I feel I can get down on myself. I feel it’s my career, so I’ve got to do something about it.” she said with a laugh.

Despite a 1.83 ERA and the awesome number of strikeouts, Hardy’s senior season presented a variety of tests and challenges, as evidenced by her 14-9 record.

Against mediocre teams such as Inglewood and Beverly Hills, she could afford a few mental lapses and occasional wildness.

But when the playoffs rolled around and Hacienda Heights Wilson traveled to Santa Monica’s Memorial Park to take on the Lady Vikings, Hardy discovered she would have little margin for error. Although she struck out 11, she lost 2-0 in 10 innings.

“What I think hurt me most is that I lost my concentration at times and wasn’t throwing the pitch I wanted,” Hardy said. “I was thinking, ‘I’m not holding the ball tightly enough,’ and when I started thinking, that’s when I got into trouble.”

But Hardy wasn’t heartbroken over the loss. “I’ve taken it in stride. It happens.”

After losing many tight battles in her senior year, she has learned to take things in stride.

Culver City shared the Ocean League championship with Hawthorne with 13-2 records. Hardy’s games against them were of championship caliber as she threw 14 strikeouts twice and 11 once and allowed only seven hits. She whiffed 13 against Hawthorne.

But there was one problem. Santa Monica lost the Hawthorne game, 3-1 in extra innings, and two of the three games against Culver City, 3-0 and 2-1.

“She’s intimidating. She throws the ball harder than most of the girls we’ve faced, so that was an adjustment,” Culver City Coach Lou Lichtl said. “She’s throwing the ball past people. She overpowers 80% of the batters.”

But a team doesn’t go 13-2 in league without devising plans to take advantage of every opportunity to sneak a runner on base against Hardy.

“One drawback she has is the number of walks,” Lichtl said. “If you get a runner on base and try to bunt, she has problems picking up the ball and making the play. That doesn’t really take away from her total ability, but it has hurt her.”

Santa Monica Coach Debbie Skaggs said Hardy had only one error all season, against Culver City.

“If she’s improved one facet from last year, it’s her fielding,” Skaggs said. “She had problems with that last year. She used to be wild in throws.

“I think she’s the best pitcher in the league in that she strikes out a lot of people, but she walks a lot of people. She allows a lot of walks because she sometimes tries to overpower hitters too much when she should finesse them more. She has five pitches (fastball, change-up, drop, rise and curve) but sometimes relies too much on the fastball.”

She allowed eight walks in a game against Culver City that was played in the rain.

“Good pitchers learn to overcome that,” Skaggs said of the rain. “It’s tough to win at Culver anyway because they’re awesome on their home field. I think mentally she let (the walks) get to her. It was tough for both pitchers. It was just a matter of who was going to survive in the elements.”

“The water was splashing in my eyes and I couldn’t see,” Hardy said.

Against Hawthorne this season, Santa Monica was leading in the sixth inning and “things just started falling apart,” Skaggs said. What’s worth noting from the 3-1 loss was that three of Hardy’s four walks came in the sixth.

“We didn’t supply enough offense for her,” Skaggs said. “You’re not going to win games scoring one run.”

But despite a few thorns in Hardy’s rosy season, Skaggs reiterates that her team leader is the best pitcher in the league and all teams look to neutralize her. They have to keep an eye on her at the plate also, as her .467 average attest.

“It’s rare that I get nervous for a game,” Hardy said. “Even as a freshman, I felt a lot of responsibility.”

Will that be the case when she starts playing in college. West Point and its challenges await.