For Windmiller and Jones, Being Newsy Gets Old : College softball: Northridge roommates weary of telling media how they escaped during earthquake.

Amy Windmiller and Shannon Jones, roommates who survived the Northridge Meadows apartment disaster in the 6.8 earthquake, want to forget what happened Jan. 17, the most horrifying day of their lives.

Problem is, the media won’t let them.

The siege began the day after the quake and has barely abated nearly three months later. Everywhere the Cal State Northridge softball players go, someone sticks a reporter’s pad or microphone at them.

So when Sports Illustrated came calling in Fresno last weekend for Northridge’s doubleheader against Fresno State, Windmiller and Jones were unimpressed. While other players chatted with friends and family before boarding the team bus for the 3 1/2-hour ride back to Los Angeles, Windmiller and Jones were asked to accommodate one more photographer.

They were tired--Northridge had played four games in two days, traveling by bus from Los Angeles to Sacramento to Fresno. Their frequent sighs were a dead giveaway. The prospect of a 15-minute photo session bored them.

“We’ve talked about it so much, it kinda gets old,” Windmiller said. “But if it brings notoriety to the team, then we’ll keep doing it.”

After the earthquake collapsed the pair’s first-floor Northridge Meadows apartment, the two became a hot news item.

Windmiller and Jones were lucky. Jones was able to flee out a bedroom window from the first-floor apartment, and Windmiller, who was awake and lying on a couch in the living room when the earthquake hit, bolted out the front door. Several hours and aftershocks later, the apartment disappeared under the second and third floors of the building.

The Sacramento natives lost everything--but their lives.

Reporters from newspapers, television and magazines have asked the roommates--friends since childhood--to relive the agonizing moments of the earthquake that killed 16 of their neighbors.

“We’ve had at least six different TV stations (on campus to interview Windmiller and Jones),” said Barry Smith, Northridge’s sports information director.

Windmiller and Jones, once batterymates at Mira Loma High in Sacramento, have diligently obliged each reporter.

Nearly three months later, reporters are still hounding the media-weary pair. “Everyone wants a story,” said Jones, a third baseman.

Their story continues to gain momentum because the seniors are having the finest seasons of their college careers.

Windmiller, who was 19-6 with a 1.09 earned-run average last season, has improved dramatically. She is 14-1 with an 0.20 ERA, has 128 strikeouts in 105 innings and has thrown five no-hitters.

Jones, who has never batted better than .232 in college, is hitting .395 with 19 runs batted in and four home runs.

Is there a correlation between surviving the killer earthquake and responding with career-high seasons? Perhaps.

Jones has never been more focused on the playing field, Coach Gary Torgeson said.

“Maybe the incident helped her focus more because, well, she could have been dead,” Torgeson said.

A day after the earthquake, a cameraman from an area television station arrived to interview Windmiller and Jones. Two days later, CBS sent a limousine to fetch them so the pair could tell their story to millions of viewers on “CBS This Morning.”

Seemingly every sports section in America has profiled the players. Twice, they appeared in feature stories on CNN.

“As long as Windmiller and Jones stay hot, I’m trying to push it,” said Smith, who thinks the story is tailor-made for the media. “If it was distracting them to the point they couldn’t do things, I wouldn’t do it.”

According to Torgeson, talking about the disaster has helped his two players cope with the tragedy.

“It’s been good for Amy and Shannon to talk about it,” Torgeson said. “It’s better to talk about it than to keep it in. This is giving them the opportunity to do that.”