July 26, 2010
by Lauren Brownlow, Tar Heel Monthly
Softball pitchers don't seem to be doing much with the ball, just circling their arm around and releasing the ball underhanded. It looks fast, and it is; a 70-mile-an-hour pitch is the equivalent of 100 miles an hour in baseball because of the different distances from mound to plate.
But just like with a baseball, different grips and release techniques can make the ball do crazy things. Danielle Spaulding doesn't throw in the 70's; she was thrilled to hit the mid-60's late in her collegiate career. So she made her living through deception.
A rise ball is her specialty. Opponents know it, but it doesn't matter. Their coaches tell them repeatedly to lay off it, but it seemingly heads right down the middle and they can't help but swing.
But if you avoid the rise, you might see her curveball. She can throw a curve on both sides of the plate, meaning it can look like a ball and curve in for a strike, or vice versa.
Then you will likely see her drop ball, one that was perfected unintentionally when she broke her hand this season. That ball will look like a normal pitch until it drops down suddenly, ideally as soon as it reaches the batter.
Of course, teams don't generally take well to being befuddled. They'd rather be physically dominated, it seems, than suffer the insult of being out-foxed. A head coach once said of Spaulding: "Even though (she) threw a great game, a lot of her game was us chasing pitches out of the zone that we shouldn't have chased."
A player from another team echoed that. "What could we have done better? Just swing at some pitches. She gets ahead of you, she tries to get you to chase a rise ball, and if we'd shown a little more plate discipline I think we could have been more successful."
Famous last words, uttered by many Carolina opponents over the last four years.
"Me being not a very fast pitcher, I have a lot of movement on my ball so I'm going to make you chase it. I'm not going to put it in the zone because it's going to go out of the park," Spaulding said. "I've heard that many times. `Oh, well we were having a bad day.'"
Of the 241 hits she gave up in four years, 167 were singles. Her pitches are designed to induce ground-outs or strike outs, and she got plenty of both. Her ERA was the highest as a freshman at 1.93, but she had a 64-16 record in her four years and lowest as a sophomore (when she won ACC Player of the Year) at 0.97. As a junior, she led the nation in strikeouts per seven innings (14.2).
She kept her ERA at 1.21 this year despite a broken hand. Her 344 strikeouts set a single-season school record. Opponents batted .113 against her and she threw six no-hitters. Both are UNC softball records, as was her third appearance on an All-America team, this time on the first team.
The Southern Californian is not performing some sort of magic trick. Her arsenal was developed over hours and in some cases years of repetition.
She's been playing softball since she was old enough to remember, fiddling with the dirt in the outfield like any normal five-year-old. But by the time she was seven, she was seeing a pitching coach regularly. At nine, she helped her 10-and-under team--the SoCal Crunch--win the 10-and-under nationals.
Eventually, she was playing or practicing softball for all but 2-3 weeks a year and all but 1-2 days a week. A work ethic that head coach Donna Papa praises as one of the best she has ever seen was born out of a childhood of sacrifice and prioritizing--softball, homework, church and family had to be taken care of before friends.
"Looking back, I'm glad that my parents did that because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them," Spaulding said. "I'm glad that they stuck to it and put the pressure on me to practice and do that because I wouldn't be as good as I am now and where I am now. A lot of that has to do with them."
She even missed her senior Homecoming dance to go on an official visit to North Carolina, a school she knew little about before getting a letter. She had put off the visit a few times and it was her No. 1 school, so she didn't want to keep putting it off. Reluctantly, she got on a plane. All it took was a springtime walk around campus and she was hooked.
She was following in the footsteps of her big sister Amber (25). Both set goals of getting Division I scholarships, and both did (Amber went to Oklahoma). Both wanted to get out of California. Both wanted to find themselves and grow up away from home, and both did.
"It really helped our kids because they had to basically be on their own. It made them a better person, a stronger person," said the girls' father, Bill Spaulding. "But it was very hard on us. We always have been a very close family and we loved seeing our kids play. If you've ever watched a softball game on GameTracker, it's terrible. It was so hard for us to watch those little stick figures and we're yelling at the computer and this and that."
There are two more sisters: Ariana, 20, is the only non-softball Spaulding; she swam and played water polo. Delaney, 15, is already being recruited for softball. Ariana and Danielle shared a bedroom for most of high school--by choice.
When they're home, the four girls pile into one bedroom, staying up all night to watch movies and quote them. The soft-spoken Danielle is able to let go in front of her sisters and be as goofy as she wants to be. But on game day, it would be hard to believe that she has ever cracked a smile.
Her "game face" has become somewhat infamous. Opponents growing up thought it meant she was stuck up or mean. Her mother thought her furrowed brow and protruding lower lip were comical. Danielle was almost completely unaware of how it looked.
Her stoic persona is almost as maddening as her pitches. Against NC State, she lost a perfect game in the bottom of the seventh with two outs by giving up a solo home run. She's been hit by pitchers as a batter, hit by line drives as a pitcher and pitched through all kinds of aches and pains. Through it all, her face stays the same.
Some of her teammates like to shout words of encouragement to each other throughout an inning; she stays silent. Teammate Christine Knauer is particularly vocal, but even she can't distract Spaulding.
"She gets into a zone that I've hardly seen out of any other athlete that I've played with," Knauer said. "We'll be in the infield and to get her attention, you have to really scream because she's really focused on what she's doing. She gets into this zone where she's focused on her pitches and hitting her spots and beating the batter. So unless you get her attention, you kind of shock her sometimes."
During a particularly dominant 19-strikeout performance against Stanford, she didn't notice that one batter had tried to bunt three times in a row during an at-bat. "I get so focused and so into the game, I don't pay attention to anything," Spaulding said. "Obviously if the ball is coming at me I'm not going to not see it. But for that split second while I pitch the ball, I don't think about anything else. I'm just pitching to my catcher."
That doesn't mean she likes giving up home runs, whether or not they interrupt a perfect game or a no-hitter. Sometimes, she doesn't deliver the pitch the way she wanted and sometimes, her opponent just connects on a great pitch. Against Campbell as a junior, she had 19 strikeouts with two outs to go in the seventh and a no-hitter going. She gave up a homerun and she struck out the next two, giving her a Carolina single-game record 21 strikeouts.
Her dual threat capabilities are unique; she led the team in home runs for two of her four years. "Me being a good hitter has a lot to do with me being a pitcher. I like to pick up different tendencies that pitchers do," Spaulding said. "I know how a pitcher pitches. If they jam me inside twice, I'm like, `If she's smart, she's not going to throw me inside again. She's going to go outside on me.' Being a pitcher kind of helps me a little bit as a hitter because I think of it in a different way."
The way she is isolated on the mound, everyone's eyes on her, seems contrary to her nature. She is terrified of public speaking; her dad joked that she should just wear a glove and sprinkle chalk around her. That's when she becomes a different person.
That focus has driven her to overcome all kinds of obstacles, like a broken elbow as a freshman followed by a sprained wrist from falling in the bathroom before what would have been her first start. She followed that up with chronic shoulder pain her sophomore year that led to surgery before her junior year. She came back too soon from that and dealt with pain as it healed, then was hit on the hand later that year.
Fortunately, the Florida State pitcher hit the fleshy part. Unfortunately, when Spaulding was a senior and feeling as good as she had ever felt, the same exact pitcher hit nearly the same exact spot again, only this time it broke her hand.
She called her shoulder injury her most frustrating, but the broken hand was surely the most severe. She couldn't pitch back-to-back games until she started getting a different injection. Even then, her hand and wrist swelled up the next day and she couldn't move her arm.
In the NCAA Tournament in Seattle, she pitched two no-hitters against Nebraska and held defending national champion Washington to three runs in two games and threw four games in two days. Two were against National Player of the Year and Washington pitcher Danielle Lawrie, who made a point to compliment Spaulding after Carolina's loss. Washington fans and Carolina fans wrote to Papa and her staff, raving on how well Spaulding represented the University.
The ESPN crew calling the Washington Regional said Spaulding put the program "on the map." In one of her only TV appearances, she saw herself getting hit in the face with a line drive on SportsCenter while her catcher Ally Blake made the top ten plays.
"I just remember seeing her face when we were watching SportsCenter and she was just ecstatic. Stuff like that, that just makes it so much better," Spaulding said, taking it in stride.
Her name recognition did help put Carolina softball on the map. It's part of what motivated her to push through those injuries--a love for her teammates and a feeling that Carolina Family that does apply to other sports.
"People really associated North Carolina with Danielle Spaulding or Danielle Spaulding with UNC. She really helped elevate our program," Papa said. "It's always nice when you can come into a program and change it or leave it in a better place than when you started. That's not to say that we hadn't achieved, but she had a lot to do with us getting recognized on a national level, not just in the conference or just in this area."
She also has an undeniable pull to softball, part of what gets her out of bed to do her third or fourth workout that day. "Right after I got home, I went to go see my younger sister (Delaney) play and I was so antsy because all I wanted to do was be out there on the field," Spaulding said.
Young girls now flock to Anderson Stadium. Some might come back for a clinic or a camp, and associate head coach Beverly Smith remembered a game where the girls waited 20 minutes for Spaulding, who had been with the media and then icing her arm.
"So I went upstairs and said, `Dani, there are some girls waiting outside for you.' Those girls just lit up when Dani came out to sign their autographs," Smith said. "She had a tremendous impact on all the kids and they want to be like Dani Spaulding some day."
She loves working with children, and wants to be a nurse someday. For now, her All-Star Softball team travels around giving free clinics to young girls, and she also gives private pitching lessons.
"When parents come up to me and say, `You're doing such a great job. My daughter looks up to you,' it's just so rewarding. It's the most rewarding thing about playing and about what I've accomplished," Spaulding said.
Her fans do range in age, however, and in gender. Though she has not been as appreciated as some of Carolina's other athletes, important ones have noticed her.
"She's one of the most inspiring athletes I think we've ever had," chancellor Holden Thorpe said. "I can sit on my back porch and hear them saying, `Now pitching, Danielle Spaulding...' so whenever I hear that, I go running down to see them play. That's my cue."
Past Tar Heels of the Year
2002: David Thornton, football
2003: Shalane Flanagan, track
2004: Roy Williams and Anson Dorrance, basketball/women's soccer
2005: Mia Hamm, women's soccer
2006: The Carolina baseball team
2007: Robert Woodard, baseball
2008: Rachel Dawson, field hockey
2009: Tyler Hansbrough, basketball
