Few experiences in softball are unfamiliar to Kelly Kretschman at this point. In the almost 15 years since her All-American stint at the University of Alabama, she has earned championship rings and Olympic medals. In at-bats accumulated by the thousands, she both delivered big hits and went down swinging. She won. She lost.
Even the batting title and MVP award the 35-year-old outfielder is chasing as the oldest player in National Pro Fastpitch -- the five-team domestic professional league now more than a decade old -- wouldn't be wholly unexplored territory. After all, she led the league in hits six seasons ago, and two seasons ago earned all-league honors.
That she has been there and done that when it comes to softball is also why she will soon savor the newness of an experience that many people her age take for granted. She will do something that, by her recollection, she hasn't done since she finished at Alabama and chose to follow a sport wherever it might lead.
She will go home. Kretschman will pack up the relatively few necessities she brought along for her summer in Florida, where the NPF's USSSA Pride is based, and she will return to San Marcos, Texas, for her second year as an assistant coach at Texas State University.
No moving logistics to manage. No new address. Her stuff will already be there. How novel.
Staying ahead of pitchers for a decade and a half is difficult. Staying ahead of a clock that runs faster for female athletes in the upper echelon of team sports than for their male counterparts is more difficult. But by staying ahead of the clock, by living life on the field, Kretschman gives the rest of us time to notice one of the all-time greats.
"It's not easy, but I'm getting to do what I love every single day," Kretschman said. "I'm getting paid to play softball. There's nothing better to me than that."
Life of a journey(wo)man
The only active NPF player who was born in the 1970s, and one of only six such players among the 26 rosters that make up the NPF, WNBA and National Women's Soccer League (there are seven players who were born in the '70s on the rosters of the American League East alone), Kretschman has lived in nearly a permanent state of impermanence. Whether it's Olympic tours with Team USA; NPF franchises in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and Virginia; temporary college coaching jobs; or traveling the country attending clinics and camps, she has led the life of a journeyman.
Except that in sports, we understand journeymen to be those good enough to find a home elsewhere but not special enough to stay where they are. Kretschman -- who, as of the weekend, led the NPF in stolen bases, ranked second in batting average and home runs and fourth in RBIs -- remains as special a talent now as she was before the NPF existed, before the Women's College World Series was televised live and before some of her current teammates could swing a bat.
She isn't the product of the sport's recent history; she is the story of it.
Back when he was an assistant coach for an Alabama program that was still in its infancy and was consigned to play off campus on municipal fields, Patrick Murphy first saw Kretschman during a youth tournament in South Carolina in 1996. He recalled glancing around the room from which coaches could survey multiple fields and wondering why few others were watching the one Kretschman was on. He finally asked Florida Atlantic coach Joan Joyce, herself one of the game's all-time great players, if she knew the kid -- and if what he saw was normal for Kretschman. Yes and yes, Joyce replied.
"I thought she was head and shoulders above everybody else, just the way she moved, the way she carried herself," Murphy said of Kretschman. "This was an athlete playing softball; it wasn't a softball person playing softball. It was an athlete who had picked the game of softball to play."
She picked it not altogether willingly, at least not at first. First in New York and then in Florida, where she moved during grade school, Kretschman played basketball, soccer and baseball, not softball. Nearly two decades before Mo'ne Davis lived out a similar script, what Kretschman wanted most of all was to play basketball for Geno Auriemma at Connecticut and be the next Jennifer Rizzotti. But come baseball season, she would take the mound.
"I loved pitching," Kretschman recalled. "I loved striking out the boys; it was so much fun."
While two decades is the blink of an eye in many scales of measurement, it is eons in softball, particularly outside the sport's West Coast cradle. Florida in the early 1990s was not the state now home to two-time NCAA defending champion University of Florida and a recruiting base that fills rosters throughout the South and beyond. Florida State has its share of history, but softball was such an afterthought that the Gators didn't even field a team until 1997, which is indicative of the state's outpost status in the sport. It was not until she was in high school, in fact, that Kretschman's school first sponsored a fastpitch team.
That she was expected to make the switch from baseball to softball, rather than offered the choice, highlights how progress occurs in fits and starts, but the 1996 Olympics helped overcome her initial reluctance to give up baseball. Played in the heart of the South, those Games marked softball's Olympic debut. In Kretschman's eyes, softball gained a cool factor. Someone like Lisa Fernandez was just as tough a competitor and impressive an athlete as any of Auriemma's players at Connecticut or soccer stars like Mia Hamm. Kretschman hung an American flag by her bed and dreamed of winning a gold medal.
After serving as an alternate on the next Olympic team in 2000 after her junior season at Alabama, Kretschman and Cat Osterman were the only players on the 2004 team from somewhere other than Arizona or California. Kretschman followed Dot Richardson, a legend with extensive California connections, as just the second player from the South to make an Olympic roster.
Now the head coach of a national team that hopes to make an Olympic return in 2020, Ken Eriksen was an assistant on the team that won gold in 2004. Also the longtime head coach at South Florida, where he was familiar with Kretschman from her earliest days in the sport, he described her as "one of the best natural athletes" he ever saw.
"She worked her way onto that 2004 team," Eriksen said. "She was a huge part of our success, probably one of the most unsung heroes on that team because she was a tough kid to pitch around and had a great eye. Walking her set up a lot of other people, and she relished the role."
That she is such a patient hitter, one who will wait to hit a mistake pitch out of the park or take a walk and steal second, isn't necessarily the result of her personality, but the two marry well. Some people warned Murphy that she had an attitude. And to be fair, she earned a place in Alabama lore as a legendary player, not a legendary practice participant. But it may well be she was merely confident in herself at a time when a whole lot of people were still more comfortable with words like "demure."
Now the coach of the United States junior national team, as well as Cal State Northridge, Tairia Flowers chuckled when asked about her former Olympic teammate.
"Kelly definitely exudes confidence," Flowers said. "When you see her, she's got a little bit of a strut. I think the awesome thing about Kelly is she backs it up. I think she's probably one of the best hitters I've seen. She's so patient at the plate. She'll take until two strikes almost every single at-bat, and I don't know how many people are comfortable hitting with two strikes. That just tells you right there she knows that she just needs one pitch to get it done.
"She's a ballplayer."
Growing the game
The average NPF player is no more than two years removed from college. To reach even 30 years old as an active player is a rare feat. In some cases, bodies break down. In some cases, passion wanes. In most cases, reality intervenes. The salary cap for an entire roster, usually around 20 players, is $150,000. Some simple long division reveals a stark truth about the typical player's take-home pay. That can be supplemented through avenues like a personal services contract with the team, and USSSA Pride owner Don DeDonatis has the deepest pockets in the league, but even with a supplemental contract, it's still not big money. Add it to income from clinics or from a job as a college assistant coach (with a boss flexible enough to offer summers off, at least for a year or two), and it works out to enough to get by, if not get rich.
"It's not necessarily a bad thing that we don't get paid like Major League Baseball players because who knows if we would still be doing the same things that we do," Kretschman said. "Would we sign autographs for 45 minutes after our games if we were getting paid that much? I don't know. Would we go sit at Disney and sign autographs for two hours? I don't know if those same things would be happening if we were on that same level. It's not nice because we don't have the money, and obviously everyone loves having money, but we get to do things that most Major League Baseball players don't really do. We get to see the smiles on the kids' faces when we give them an autograph.
"The contact they get with us, they're not going to get that with Major League Baseball players. That's kind of rewarding in itself."
The goal, of course, is to help the game grow to such a degree that kids' smiles aren't the only reward. But just as Flowers noted that Kretschman backs up the swagger with which she carries herself on the field, she also does more than talk a good game when it comes to savoring rewards beyond money.
Promoted to head coach while Kretschman was at Alabama, Murphy tried to sell his still-new program to locals more familiar with Bear Bryant's football teams by promising a softball version of Joe Namath, someone who could on any given day do something that none of them had ever before seen. Come for Kretschman, stay for the softball.
These days, with a season-ticket waiting list and the biggest crowds in college softball, he let fans know what to could expect from then-newly-arrived Haylie McCleney by comparing the outfielder, now a rising senior and an All-American, to Kretschman.
"Here's a kid from Indian Harbor Beach, Florida, that was easily one of the best kids in the country, definitely in the college game," Murphy said of Kretschman. "And then obviously she made her mark with a gold medal and a silver medal. She helped grow the sport in the South."
And still she plays on. She has outlasted all of the peers in whose shadow she so often played. And she keeps hitting.
She isn't looking to leave Texas State, where she coaches alongside retirement-bound Osterman on head coach Ricci Woodard's staff, but it is the game between the lines that will decide what the future holds. Just as it steered her in the past.
"I can't imagine doing anything else at this point," Kretschman said. "I thought about not playing next year and all of that, and I can't really give people an answer about what I want to do. I still enjoy putting on the uniform, going to the field and playing every single day."
Pitchers still struggle to slow her down. Time hasn't fared much better.