Hoover High Says Goodby to a Diamond Gem in Pitcher Evans : Softball: The senior, who will attend Arizona in the fall, ranks among the Southern Section’s top five in seven pitching categories.

Not long ago, Nancy Evans was a tomboy--and darn proud of it.

But somewhere between playing T-ball with the boys at age 9 and becoming one of the country’s best high school softball pitchers nine years later, Evans had a change of heart.

“I hate that word now,” said Evans, a senior at Hoover High. “Now, if anybody calls me a tomboy. . . . Ooh, it makes me mad because I’m not and I don’t want to be considered that. I don’t want to be labeled that. I’m just like any other girl.”

Off the playing field, perhaps. But put a softball in her right hand and she is distinctly different--she’s Queen of the Diamond.

Few girls can hurl a softball 63 m.p.h. from 40 feet with pinpoint accuracy and consistency. How accurate? For every 45 batters Evans has struck out this season, only one has walked. The right-hander strives for perfection every time she steps on the pitching rubber. Anything less is, well, exactly that.

“Nothing’s ever good enough,” Evans said. “I always think I can do better.”

No softball pitcher in Southern Section history has thrown more perfect games (14) than Evans, who ranks among the section’s top five in seven pitching categories. She pitched three perfect games this season, but even finds fault in perfection. Against Burbank on March 30, Evans tossed a perfect game and struck out 20 of 21 batters. Guess where she saw room for improvement.

She is an intense competitor who throws wicked screwballs but has built her reputation with the rise. She will have lettered 11 times in three sports when she completes her eligibility at Hoover this spring. An ardent fan of collegiate and professional sports, she spent nine hours of New Year’s Day watching football games. But baseball is her favorite spectator sport.

Evans is definitely not your ordinary girl next door. How many 17-year-old girls walk around campus with scabby knees--sustained from stretching a single into a double--plainly exposed under a miniskirt? Evans does. She doesn’t like the way her scabby knees look, but she certainly doesn’t try to hide them.

“When I was little, (scabs) were like cool, but now it’s like, when is it going to go away?” Evans chortled.

Off the field, Evans easily could be mistaken for a Seventeen magazine cover girl.

In uniform, however, Evans portrays a different image: Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail and her green eyes transform from a sparkle into an icy stare. The smile is gone and all that remains of the cover girl image is her poster-perfect posture. Her shoulders thrown back, standing atop the pitching rubber, Evans appears taller than her 5-foot-8 frame and twice as intimidating.

Kelly Christiansen, Evans’ catcher, best friend and classmate since kindergarten, has witnessed the Evans intimidation factor firsthand.

“I’ve had a lot of girls ask me if she was (mean) because they see her game face and her intensity and because she’s so good, you want to hate her,” Christiansen said. “And, I’ll say, ‘No, she’s really nice.’ ”

Evans’ demeanor off the field is indeed pleasant. She cares--probably too much--about what her classmates think of her. Some might say Nancy Evans plays ball like a guy. But while that is meant as a compliment, it’s liable to strike a crushing blow to the sensitive Evans.

“I tell her all the time you can be pretty and you can be feminine, but you can also dive and get dirty and that does not make you any less feminine,” Coach Kirt Kohlmeier said. “I want her to realize she can have the best of both worlds. Guys love that.”

Kohlmeier, who does not expect to coach a player again as good as Evans, probably is the pitcher’s No. 1 fan. If Kohlmeier had a daughter, he would want Nancy Evans to be her role model.

“Never in my entire life have I met a girl or a woman who carries herself so well in everything she does--school, social and athletics,” Kohlmeier said. “She’s a Cindy Crawford looks-wise and a Pete Rose combined into one.”

Until her senior year, Evans said, she had extremely low self-esteem, but overcame those insecurities by surrounding herself with friends who helped boost her confidence. And that attention she receives from Hoover two-sport athlete Nate Dishington doesn’t hurt either.

The tomboy from Glendale has come a long way since being introduced to softball 10 years ago. One day while Evans sat in the stands watching her brother Mike play baseball, a mother of one of her brother’s teammates approached with a softball in hand. The woman, who also had a teen-age daughter who played softball, handed the eager youngster a softball and taught Evans how to sling the ball underhand into the fence.

Evans caught on quickly and thought the new trick was “neat,” but baseball remained her sport of choice. She still wanted to play baseball with the boys and became one of the first girls to play in Glendale’s Little League.

Evans competed with her brother Mike, who is three years older and her only sibling.

“It’s been a competition between her and her brother all her life,” Mike Evans Sr. said. “She always wanted to be as good as her brother.”

Following in big brother’s footsteps, Evans played T-ball for two years before her parents took her aside to tell her the facts of life.

“They told me there was no future for me in baseball,” Evans said.

It was a bitter dose of reality for Evans. “I was a little upset by that because I wanted to keep playing with the guys,” she said. “Because at the time, the guys were way better than the girls and I wanted the competition.”

Reluctantly, she returned to that other game--the one girls play, softball. Before her 11th birthday, Evans received her first pitching lesson from Mark Elliot, now an assistant for Crescenta Valley.

Evans was a model student and progressed rapidly. Her confidence level however, wasn’t as quick to develop. During her windmill pitching debut in a youth league game, Evans hit four consecutive batters and was reduced to tears. She told her mother that she “was never going to pitch again.”

“I was frustrated and hitting them was like showing me that I couldn’t do it,” Evans said.

But Mary Evans would not allow her daughter to quit. To help her conquer her fear, Mary instructed her son Mike to stand over the plate while Evans threw practice pitches.

It worked. And in the intervening years since her debut, Evans developed into perhaps the most sought-after pitching recruit in the nation who hit only two batters in four seasons. Two foot-high stacks of letters from universities illustrate Evans’ widespread appeal.

Third-ranked Arizona won the bidding war for Evans, who until her senior year thought she would play for top-ranked UCLA. But fleeing congested Los Angeles and playing for a male coach in Arizona’s new $1-million softball complex appealed to Evans.

She called Arizona Coach Mike Candrea the night she returned from her recruiting trip in October to tell him she wanted to be a Wildcat. Shortly after Evans’ conversation with Candrea had ended, her phone rang. When Evans picked up the receiver, she heard singing. It was Candrea and his two teen-age children singing the Arizona fight song to their newest recruit.

“That should give you a good indication of how excited I was,” Candrea said. “She’s one of the top pitchers in the country.”

Awards have been piling up for Evans, a three-sport athlete at Hoover, since childhood. So much so, she has a tough time keeping track of them. In April, Cal-Hi Sports named Evans the state athlete of the week. But she didn’t know about the award until a reporter told her two weeks later.

“Wow, that’s kinda neat,” she said.

Evans has garnered nearly every award from Hoover’s most valuable player in volleyball, basketball and softball, to the Southern Section’s 4-A Division softball co-player of the year last season (along with Foothill’s Kelley Green). An outstanding accomplishment considering Evans was the only divisional player of the year recognized last season whose team did not win the championship.

Evans’ dominating pitching however, did not translate into postseason success. The Tornadoes (23-2-1), who lost to Bishop Amat (21-6-1) in a first-round Division II playoff game last week, never advanced past the quarterfinals in Evans’ four years.

Evans, who averaged more strikeouts an inning (2.1) than hits a game (1.8) this season, finished 23-2 with an 0.08 earned-run average. The two games she lost were two-hitters.

Her career numbers are mind-boggling. She ranks fifth in the section in victories (78), strikeouts (1,252), shutouts (58) and no-hitters (24). Her single-game highs of 26 (twice) and 27 strikeouts rank fifth and sixth, and her season-high four perfect games in 1991 and 1992 rank third best.

Despite Evans’ athletic accomplishments, none will land her a spot in the lineup on a professional baseball team. She learned that a long time ago when she discovered there was no future in baseball for a girl. Her childhood dreams were squelched before she hit her teens.

“I’ve always thought it was kind of unfair that guys have pro baseball and there’s nothing for girls,” Evans said. “Because if I was a guy, the thing I would want to do is play pro baseball and get paid for it.”

Perhaps that early realization that boys and girls had different opportunities based strictly on gender has played a part in many of Evans’ decisions. Like the fact that Evans campaigned and was elected associated student body director of girls athletics instead of boys athletics. Or that she had to play girls’ basketball rather than boys’, despite the fact that Kohlmeier, also the boys’ basketball coach, said she could have started on the boys’ team.

Evans, who batted .442 with nine doubles, 13 runs batted in and 16 stolen bases, is never going to earn $1 million a season doing what she does best. But she can dream.

“They’re making all these new expansion teams for baseball, why don’t they transfer that money into girls’ softball?” she asked.

Time has definitely changed Evans. Somewhere between tomboy and teen-age beauty emerged a well-rounded individual--one who can routinely strike out a batter on three pitches one day and enjoy a shopping spree at the mall with friends the next.

“When I was younger, (sports) was really all I cared about besides school,” Evans said. “But now that I’m older, I’m more involved with school activities and going out with my friends and doing stuff like that. I don’t want to make my whole life softball.”