It’s a Situation Every Coach Would Like to be in, but Doug Myers Says His Mater Dei Softball Team Might Have : Too Much Talent

You are coming off a season in which everyone doubted you.

Critics initially said the softball team had one weakness: you.

But you were the only pitcher the team had.

And what did you do?

You won 26 games. Only one player in county history has won more.

You showed ‘em.

And you showed yourself. You spent your freshman year on the bench and pitched only a handful of games as a sophomore. You bided your time.

When you got your chance, you pitched your team to the section title game.

And now you’re a senior. It’s your time to shine. Nearly everyone on your team is back. And what happens?

A hotshot freshman enrolls and a hotshot senior transfers to your school.

Now, there’s competition in the pitching circle.

You’re Mater Dei’s Colleen Boddy. How do you feel?

*

Doug Myers, who coached a young team to the Southern Section championship game, was The Times Orange County coach of the year in 1995. But as well as he coached last year, he’ll have to be better this season.

Mater Dei again is loaded. But will that blow up in his face and possibly tear at the fabric of one of the best collections of high school talent in the past decade?

The advantages of having so much talent are obvious. Better players mean better opportunities to win. The more, the merrier--usually.

The disadvantage?

“You can only play nine players,” Myers said. “It puts pressure on certain types of kids who are looking over their shoulders. They go 0-for-4 this game and they’re thinking, ‘Oh man,’ so it’s tough for them to play comfortably.

“I wish we were playing three or four games a day.”

But they don’t. And Myers, who has been blessed with smooth sailing so far, recognizes the potential for trouble.

“When you have these types of players,” he say, “with the depth that we do, sometimes that can lead to individual play instead of team play.”

Myers’ dilemma is obvious to everyone from La Habra to San Clemente, including his third baseman: “He has the toughest job on the team,” says Lisa Tully, who will always be one of the nine who plays.

When someone asks Myers, “Can you have too much talent?” it’s a question he doesn’t answer immediately.

Mater Dei will have players on its bench this season who already have come and gone as starters. The talent is that good. It is also young. The Monarchs batted .355 as a team and lost only one player, Melissa Cruz, who batted .338 and drove in a team-high 20 runs. They can field a team with two seniors and a junior among the eight position players that is as good as any team in the Southern Section.

And they can use freshman Marissa Young as the pitcher.

Young, whom Myers calls “possibly the top freshman in the country,” struck out 15 of the first 18 batters she faced, and 34 in her first 13 innings.

The rest of the section is clearly playing catch-up.

But if Young isn’t enough, there’s Brooke Hofstetter.

Hofstetter will play next year at Oregon State. She pitched last year at Brethren Christian, a Division V school, and compiled an 11-8 record and 0.34 earned-run average. She had 198 strikeouts in 146 innings.

It was no easy decision, she said, to leave a 600-student school where she knew everyone to spend her senior year at Mater Dei (enrollment 2,100).

“I’m going to Oregon State so I wanted to get used to a big-school atmosphere,” Hofstetter said. “[A small school] is nice, but if you want to get a little more used to a college environment--I wanted a bigger school.”

To keep from losing her athletic eligibility, she had to transfer to another private school; otherwise, she would have gone to Los Alamitos.

“Since I have already signed [a letter of intent], softball had no role in my decision,” Hofstetter said. “It doesn’t matter if I play or not.”

Hofstetter was a second-team All-Southern Section selection last year. But the Pacific 10 competition she eventually will face won’t be made up of Liberty Christians and Calvary Chapels.

“Playing at this level, you have to stay on top of your game,” Hofstetter said. “It definitely makes me try harder, and it totally prepares me for playing in the Pac-10. I have to get used to pitching against the best people in the country.”

Boddy already has pitched against the best at the high school level. She already has experienced the rush of playoffs, which Young has only heard about from her teammates.

Boddy went 26-5 with a 0.82 ERA. She was hardly intimidating, surrendering 104 hits (and walking 45) in 197 innings. She struck out 106, a strikeout ratio that was about 2.5 times less than Hofstetter’s and 4.9 times less than Young’s first 13 innings.

When Hofstetter arrived, Boddy’s friends noticed.

“A lot of my friends were like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ ” she said. “It really didn’t faze me.”

Maybe not, but Boddy, who committed recently to Connecticut, recognizes the pitching circle that was once hers alone is now part of a pie that will be divided three ways.

“I think everyone thinks they should be No. 1,” Boddy said. “They’re both good pitchers. If they work hard, I have no qualms about sharing anything with them.

“I’ve proven myself, I’m comfortable there. I’m not the new kid on the block and I’m not under scrutiny. If anything, I think they have a lot more to prove than I do.

“I showed everyone what I really was. I don’t think a lot of people took me for anything, [but] I took myself for something. I think I’m an example that hard work and focus can go a really long way.”

She has been thrust into an unusual position. She won more games last year than anybody in Orange County history except Ocean View’s Jackie Oakley (32 in 1985), and now she’s faced with a reduction in her pitching time.

Three pitchers on summer travel teams when there are many games is good, but the high school season is relatively short--usually no more than about 30 games for championship teams.

“People say it’s a nice problem to have,” Canyon Coach Lance Eddy said, “but it’s not so nice.”

Eddy recalled his first season, 1983, when he had three pitchers. It was a bad situation.

Two were juniors, one was a senior.

Senior Kristen Belt also was a good second baseman. Connie Pirus was an excellent outfielder. Lori Thompson was strictly a pitcher.

“I rotated them through the season,” Eddy said, “but basically, no one was real happy.”

As the season grew longer, Eddy used Thompson more because the other two could help the team in other positions. Thompson came back the next year and had 14 shutouts and went on to become the lead pitcher at Cal Poly Pomona. He gave Belt the second-highest number of innings “because she was the senior,” but her career was over when she graduated.

Pirus, who still had her senior season ahead of her, didn’t come back.

“She basically faded into the woodwork and didn’t want to play ball anymore,” Eddy said. “I always felt guilty that if I had given her more time, she might have stayed with it. You know, Texas A&M; was interested in her.”

It’s unlikely such a scenario could develop at Mater Dei because Boddy and Hofstetter are seniors who already have made their college choice, and Young has three years to make her mark.

Myers’ saving grace is that all three pitchers have different styles. Young throws hard, Hofstetter’s got a good drop and a great changeup and keeps the ball down, and Boddy is a combination of both who moves the ball around. One can be an effective reliever for the other.

“It’s not going to be a set rotation, it’s going to be based on matchups,” Myers said. “Whoever matches up best against certain teams.

“If you take the approach that it’s going to be a horrible situation, it probably will be.”

*

The pitching circle is like so many other positions on Mater Dei’s team--it’s a competitive environment that could create problems if players are selfish.

Myers said this team’s only weakness could be its chemistry--not because it’s bad, “because it’s not, but because there are so many quality players and some will have to sit the bench.”

How much depth is there?

There are six outfielders: junior Shealee Dunavan (.330, 19 runs, 12 runs batted in, 10 stolen bases), senior Lainie Horne, sophomore Jodi Schicker, junior Kendra Meano (.324), senior Katie Chauvin and senior Tracy Quinn, who could start anywhere.

The starters today would be Dunavan (who started at first base in last year’s championship game), Horne and Schicker. Meano started the last two years. Chauvin started her first two years and split time as a starter last year.

“We’ll go with the best player available, whether it’s a freshman or a senior,” Myers said. “If we wouldn’t have taken that approach last year, we would have had a completely different team.

“Can you imagine if I had left Courtney Ryan, Robin Walker or Kelsey Kollen out of the lineup last year? I doubt if we would have gotten to the finals last year if we had not gone with the freshmen.”

Ryan (.377), a sophomore catcher, split time last year with senior Margaret Hollis (.320) and was the starter in the title game against Marina, a 3-0 loss.

Walker (.306, 18 runs, 19 RBIs) starts at shortstop over another sophomore, Briana Lemos.

Kollen (.514, 29 runs, 13 stolen bases) played second base and was on the all-section team, and the Times all-county second team.

Young and sophomore Monica Lucatero are the leading candidates at first base, but Boddy (who batted .342 with 11 RBIs), Hofstetter and senior Paige Kollen also play there. Kollen was a starter as a sophomore.

“Because there’s so much talent on this team, we have to be a selfless group,” said Tully, who is the captain. “It has to be more than batting averages and strikeouts. It has to be a team effort. Or, for me, personally, it means nothing.

“If you let one person get under your skin, that can affect you, and that affects the team. That cannot happen, and so far, it hasn’t.”