PITCHING AND PIZZAZZ

Jocelyn Forest is a little like the pitches she throws, often breaking sharply and unpredictably from the expected path.

The senior right-hander for the Santa Maria Righetti High softball team is as likely to strike up a band or a pose for some new artistic endeavor as she is to strike out an opposing batter.

And that’s saying a lot, considering that Forest has struck out 1,178 in four seasons with the Warriors.

“She’s really quite a character, a real personality,” Righetti Coach Richard Cornejo said.

Forest, the Southern Section Division II player of the year in 1997, is an athlete of many talents. Her ability to confound batters with a combination of power and precision pitching is only the one most widely known in high school softball circles.

“I have so many other things I like to do, and so many things I would like to do, that if I hadn’t been as good at it as I am, softball probably would have been something I just did for recreation and my life would have been so different,” she said.

Forest ranks among the best pitchers to come out of Righetti, which also produced former UCLA pitchers Tracy and Heather Compton and Kandy Foust, who went to Creighton.

This season, Forest (18-3) has pitched one perfect game and five no-hitters to help the Warriors to a 19-4 record, including a 9-0 mark in the Northern League. She has an 85-17 record and 0.45 earned-run average for her career and will attend California on a full softball scholarship in the fall.

“She was always good, and incredibly, she’s gotten better,” Cornejo said.

Forest holds the Southern Section single-season record for wins (33) and also will have set several school marks by the time she leaves Righetti. A three-time All-Southern Section selection, she was one of only three high school players among 60 invited to a U.S. Olympic development training camp earlier this year. Amanda Freed of Garden Grove Pacifica and Jenny Finch of La Mirada are the others.

“Bottom line is, she’s one of the best pitchers in the nation this year,” Cornejo said.

Forest, 18, admits to sometimes struggling with that status, and one of the most agonizing conflicts between her life on the softball field and her life away from it is still ahead.

She remains in the U.S. Olympic development pool of elite prospects and will miss her high school graduation ceremony next month because of a national-team tournament in Texas.

“That was a hard decision for her,” said Viki Forest, Jocelyn’s mother. “She struggled with it for a long time. But that’s her future. What do you do?”

Sometimes, Forest doesn’t know.

“I love softball. It’s part of my life--a big part--and I work hard at it,” she said. “But I’ve made a point to try to do other things too. I don’t want to get burnt out on softball, and I think I have a good mix of work and play.”

To step away from the demands of softball and school, in which she carries a 3.8 grade-point average in college-prep courses, Forest paints with water colors and acrylics and also does charcoal drawings.

Until this year, Forest satisfied her musical tastes by playing guitar and singing in three bands over the last four years.

She quit the bands because of time constraints to concentrate on pitching.

The Warriors are 104-19 in Forest’s years at Righetti, which won the last of its four Southern Section titles in 1982. With the playoffs approaching, the Warriors are seeking a return to the Southern Division II final, in which they lost to Irvine Woodbridge last year.

That defeat ended a 33-3 season in which Forest pitched every inning and piled up 504 strikeouts, coming within five of Michele Granger’s Southern Section single-season record set in 1987.

“Every batter, for me, is like a whole new challenge. Softball is so mental. It’s almost like a head game,” Forest said. “I make a point not to get into any pitching patterns.”

Forest shies away from set patterns off the field too. She likes to dye her light-brown hair almost annually, but she’s no head case.

“I don’t really try to present any particular image,” she said. “I just figure, it’s me, and I’ve got a good head on my shoulders and I’m a good person. So if someone doesn’t like me, then I feel sorry for them.”

Opposing batters wish Forest would show similar mercy toward them.

Although Righetti lost to Camarillo in an international tiebreaker in the Thousand Oaks tournament last weekend, Forest had the Scorpions sweeping dirt on her drop-pitches, swinging in self-defense at high, inside balls and chasing futilely after change-ups en route to 13 strikeouts.

“She has so much more movement [on her pitches] than just about anybody else I’ve faced,” said Alana Mendoza, who had Camarillo’s game-winning hit in the ninth inning after striking out twice and grounding out. “She’s one of the top two pitchers I’ve seen.”

Just how good Forest can still become remains to be seen. But her private coach, Tracy Davis (the former Tracy Compton), said Forest just needs to continue along her varied paths.

“I know other people do it, but I don’t agree with the idea that you have to focus solely on softball to be successful at it,” Davis says.

“As long as you put in your time for training, there’s no reason you can’t have other interests.”

Forest is proof of that.