SEATTLE — Danielle Lawrie doesn’t stay down on the mat for long.
This became clear to Alyson McWherter, a teammate on the University of Washington softball team, on May 19, 2009. The previous day had seen Lawrie throw 251 pitches and strike out 24 batters over 15 innings while leading UW to an historic postseason win at the University of Massachusetts, and the exhausted Huskies were spending their Sunday morning trying to rejuvenate their aching bodies at an East Coast hotel.
McWherter and another teammate were gingerly getting out of a hot tub after a morning soak, when her eyes fell upon the most improbable sight she could imagine. Danielle Lawrie was on a treadmill.
“That was when I knew that, when Danielle was at her best, nobody could beat her,” McWherter recalled earlier this month. “I almost peed my pants.”
UW’s star pitcher has been surprising coaches and teammates for so long that … well, Lawrie can’t really do anything else that will make them look twice.
“She never surprises anybody,” head coach Heather Tarr said late Friday night, after her star senior had pitched back-to-back shutouts to push the Huskies into their third College World Series appearance in four years.
Lawrie’s latest unexplainable feat came after she threw 257 pitches and struck out 27 batters in back-to-back elimination games against an Oklahoma lineup that had tagged her for five home runs in a 6-1 Huskies loss Thursday night.
In the hours that followed that game, Lawrie got off the mat and started burning the candle at both ends. She immediately requested a game tape of the loss, then dissected every at-bat alongside Tarr, finally returning to her University District hotel room at 1 a.m. Friday.
Less than 24 hours later, Lawrie methodically took it to the Sooners to record back-to-back shutouts late Friday night, adding another chapter to the book on her legendary college career.
“It was better than I expected her to be,” freshman catcher Shawna Wright said. “I know I wouldn’t have been able to bounce back from a game like (Thursday’s loss). Just for her to compete, and just be a stud, is really great.”
With more feats to come — Lawrie is one of three finalists for the national-player-of-the-year award that will be given out Tuesday, and then the Huskies begin play in the College World Series the following day — UW’s greatest softball player of all time continues to make a case for even bigger accolades.
Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso said last week that Lawrie may well be the best pitcher to ever play the game. And there is a growing sentiment that the senior right-hander might be the best athlete in UW history — regardless of sport.
Tim Lincecum has won the past two Cy Young trophies, but he was never named an NCAA player of the year — Lawrie is in line to win two.
Steve Entman won an Outland Trophy, finished fourth in the Heisman voting and is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, but he never won an outright national title — Lawrie is making a run at her second.
Hugh McElhenny, Hope Solo, Brandon Roy and Nick Taylor have had legendary athletic careers at UW. But none of them is as accomplished as Lawrie, either.
The only person who doesn’t seem ready to anoint Lawrie as the greatest Husky of all time is Tarr — not yet, anyway.
“We’ll talk about that when she’s done,” said Tarr, whose only non-World Series season since 2006 came when Lawrie was training with the Canadian Olympic team for the 2008 Games. “She knows how I feel about her. We’ve just got to stay in the moment and take it for what it is. As her coach, that’s what I can do to respect what she has left in her.”
In a sense, Friday night’s performance was Lawrie’s most impressive. She had to bounce back from the kind of outing that she said can “humble you as a player,” adding that she was “embarrassed” in the loss to the Sooners. The Thursday game got so bad that her father, Russ, left the stadium sometime around the fifth inning.
“He was having nothing to do with it,” Danielle Lawrie said Friday night.
UW’s star pitcher had to step back into the circle against the same lineup that knocked her around, and she showed remarkable focus, resolve and discipline while keeping the Oklahoma bats at bay through the wind and rain of Friday night’s 51/2-hour doubleheader.
Evidence of Lawrie’s newfound humility came in the way she approached OU slugger Amber Flores, who hit three of the Thursday home runs off her. Rather than vow revenge, Lawrie showed remarkable restraint and discipline while pitching around Flores on five of the OU senior’s seven at-bats. Lawrie shook off her catcher’s signal multiple times in that game while sticking with her game plan of avoiding Flores.
“I didn’t want to let her beat me,” Lawrie said late Friday night, after walking Flores five times and hitting her with a pitch.
Lawrie set the tone for a re-focused team that wasn’t going to let Thursday’s debacle be the defining image of her senior year.
“I feel like they were definitely out for revenge,” OU pitcher Keilani Ricketts said after Friday’s 3-0 and 4-0 losses to the Huskies. “Great teams make adjustments, and that’s what they did.”
As Tarr said late Friday night: “Sometimes the game kicks you in the butt, and sometimes the game pays you back.”
After Thursday’s butt-kicking, Lawrie was looking for payback. She wasn’t going to stay on the mat.
The best champions never do.
“When I was watching (Thursday’s game tape), I didn’t feel like I was competing and like I was playing the game like I usually do,” she said late Friday night. “I think the bottom line, it just comes down to: if I were to finish here, that is not ever how I want to go out. You’ve got to find something deep down inside.”
Lawrie found it — again. Nothing, it seems, can keep this Huskies star down.
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