Sometimes to a batter the neon green softball can look like a pastel balloon. Other times a pitched softball looks like a psychedelic pea.
These days, to Kansas University outfielder Erin Garvey, a softball looks more like a watermelon.
“I don’t see a lot of movement. I just feel I see it pretty well,” Garvey said.
So well that after the Jayhawks’ first 11 games she is hitting a lusty .471. Compare that to her puny .215 batting average in 57 games last season.
“This year I feel prepared when I get in the box, both mentally and physically,” Garvey said. “I’m very selective. The main thing is I just try to remember what I did and repeat it.”
In so doing, she has also made KU coach Tracy Bunge prescient.
“I know she is capable of surprising a lot of people,” Bunge said before the season, “and nothing would make me smile more than that.”
Bunge is smiling these days because she knows the knee problems Garvey, a fifth-year senior outfielder, has battled over the years.
Garvey began having trouble with her right knee when she was in high school at Olathe East. Then she went to Alabama University and blew her anterior cruciate ligament, although she stresses the injury wasn’t the reason she decided to leave the Crimson Tide.
“It was just the typical freshman year you hear about,” Garvey said. “A lot of things went wrong. I didn’t get along with the coaches. I didn’t do well in school.”
Garvey transferred to Johnson County Community College where she didn’t play softball while rehabbing the bad knee. She enrolled at Kansas in the fall of 1998 and reinjured the knee in winter workouts. That setback limited her to only 19 at-bats during her sophomore season.
Although she was healthy during the entire 2000 season, her knee wasn’t 100 percent.
“The ligaments were OK, but the strength wasn’t,” she said. “It would be sore after every game.”
Garvey is a left-handed slap hitter. That means she’s a leg hitter and the better the legs the better chance she has of reaching base.
Thus Garvey’s batting average is up. Then again, so is her age. She’s 22 and the only senior on the team which should make her a target for quite a bit of ribbing.
“No, they don’t rag on me too much,” Garvey said, smiling. “But, yes, I feel very old.”
Garvey and her KU teammates will be in Columbus, Ga., this weekend where they will face three ranked teams in the Leadoff Classic.
Kansas will face No. 24 UMass at noon today, then tangle with No. 4 Alabama at 7:30 tonight. On Saturday, KU will meet No. 6 Arizona State at noon before beginning bracket play.
Kansas, 6-5, is scheduled to go to Washburn on Monday.