Growing up in Anderson, California, a small town a few miles south of the small city of Redding in the state's northern reaches, Cheridan Hawkins followed the careers of two pitchers whose accomplishments and personas influenced her. The first was her older sister, Natasha, who went on to play collegiately at San Jose State. The other was a tall southpaw from Texas with more name recognition.
"I thought Cat Osterman was amazing," Hawkins said of arguably the best pitcher of all time. "I think I was drawn to her because she's left-handed, I loved her tenaciousness on the mound and her fierce look and her competitiveness. She was totally someone I looked up to."
Little sisters will presumably always have big sisters on whom to model their own athletic efforts. The crystal ball is cloudier when it comes to the prospects of future versions of Osterman. Or Hawkins, for that matter.
Even as Oregon adapts with the changing times, opening a new stadium and new facilities this season that mirror those popping up across the rival SEC and might well prove the envy of the Pac-12, Oregon's status as the team most likely to return the national championship to its historically dominant conference is rooted in an old softball principle.
If you have the best pitcher, you have a chance.
Hawkins enters this week's three-game road series against fellow World Series aspirant Louisiana-Lafayette with an 86-17 career record. The wins are the most among active pitchers. If she wins 35 games this season, the same total she won as a sophomore, she will tie for 20th in Division I history -- tied with, among others, former Olympians Jennie Finch and Michele Granger.
Her .840 career winning percentage entering this season ranked 21st in NCAA history. She can join former South Florida and current Team USA pitcher Sara Nevins as the only players in Division I history with 100 wins, 20 saves and 1,000 strikeouts.
She was the ace of back-to-back Pac-12 championship teams. She pitched in two World Series. Assuming her final season progresses in the manner of her first three seasons, the evidence (the five earned runs she gave up to Kentucky last week notwithstanding) suggests she is the best pitcher in college softball.
While her own coach is not an impartial arbiter, Oregon's Mike White also knows pitching as well as anyone in the sport, both as an instructor and former standout pitcher at the men's international level.
"The amount of spin she puts on the ball, I don't think there is anybody out there -- or there's very few pitchers that are able to spin it as tight as what she does," White said. "She's kind of likened to a male rise baller, the amount of spin and revolutions she puts on it. She doesn't throw overly hard, by comparison with other pitchers, but it's just the movement she's able to get through the zone.
"Everyone knows what she's throwing, but trying to hit it is another thing."
She is also increasingly an anachronism.
Look back only a decade and the Pac-12 was a conference overflowing with pitching. When Arizona won the national title in 2006, Alicia Hollowell went 32-5 with a 0.89 ERA for the Wildcats. But UCLA's Anjelica Selden was 35-7 with a 1.06 ERA that same season, and Arizona State's Katie Burkhart went 30-8 with a 1.15 ERA. Cal's Kristina Thorson (36-10 with a 0.83 ERA) and Oregon State's Brianne McGowan (29-9 with a 1.36 ERA) were likewise dominant. Only a freshman at Washington, Danielle Lawrie went 23-16 with a 1.44 ERA and 387 strikeouts.
What Hawkins managed a season ago with a 30-5 record and 1.65 ERA would have fit in well with that crowd.
The difference is that Hawkins had the Pac-12's best ERA by nearly a full run in 2015. In softball's most illustrious conference, no one else was even close.
Pick a reason for the shift toward offense that is glaring in the Pac-12 but true nationwide. There are plenty. Teams have better video technology for both scouting and instruction. Despite better testing to keep bats within the rules, even legal modern bats produce home runs at nearly double the rate of the start of the century. And of note specifically for the Pac-12, what pitching talent emerges does so from across the country. West Coast schools never needed to recruit the Midwest or Southeast before, but as White noted, Oregon has incoming pitchers from Indiana and Pennsylvania.
Osterman, now the pitching coach at Texas State and only recently retired as a player, offered another reason with particular relevance when it comes to what makes an anomaly of Hawkins, who like her role model, relies on mastery of spin more than pure velocity.
"I think the shift that we've seen in the game being more offensive is more pitchers not mastering a certain pitch," Osterman said. "They all want to try and throw three, four and five pitches. None of the pitches are 100 percent -- you can't say it's their best pitch and they can hit it 90 percent of the time."
Pitchers also aren't getting the ball as often. And the shift is changing how the sport looks and championships are won. In winning back-to-back titles the past two seasons, Florida rotated starting pitchers as late as the championship round of the World Series. It is a far cry from the image of Arizona's Taryne Mowatt throwing more than a thousand pitches during the 2007 World Series or LSU's Kristin Schmidt starting three games in one day in the 2004 World Series.
No matter how talented the pitcher, handing her the ball every game and hoping for the best is increasingly an option of last resort.
The symbolic turning point might have come in 2013, when Oklahoma started Michelle Gascoigne instead of national player of the year Keilani Ricketts in the title-clinching game. Ricketts started at least 40 games in each of her final three seasons but not that night.
"I think that offenses are becoming more explosive and powerful, and they're being more educated and better trained," Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso said. "To me, for you to throw as much as in the days of Abbott and Osterman and Ricketts and some of those big dominant [pitchers], you're going to have to be just a prodigy. You're going to have to be at another level, where people just can't touch you, in order to be used that much.
"Offenses are different now, where it's hard for one pitcher to get through a game. I think every coach in America would tell you that you can't have enough pitchers on your staff. I think the days of depending on one to throw every game could be over."
Nor is Oregon likely to ask that workload of Hawkins. Despite losing reliable No. 2 starter Karissa Hovinga to graduation, the Ducks will try to get 20-plus starts out of the rest of the staff. They have an offense, too, almost identical to the lineup that ranked ninth in the nation in runs per game a season ago.
But the best reason to pick Oregon ahead of the rest is because it has the best pitcher.
Amidst all the trends and statistics, these are still individual actors. That component can't be overlooked. And there is still a lot of ace in Hawkins. By her own admission not the most dedicated or focused of students in high school, Hawkins arrived at Oregon and learned that those athletes who earn Academic All-American distinction get their names engraved on the floor of the Jaqua Academic Center, first-team honors earning a bigger engraving. She decided that sounded kind of cool. So she became a first-team Academic All-American as a sophomore. Then the human services major did it again as a junior.
If you want to get through a lineup for the third time in a game, that kind of stubborn determination helps.
As Alabama's Jackie Traina showed as recently as 2012, softball has not moved so far that one pitcher with talent and will can't push back.
After coming up short in each of the past two seasons in Oklahoma City, Oregon's ace wants one more chance to pitch the Ducks to a title.
"Obviously, losing [in the World Series] is extremely hard," Hawkins said. "And I think about everything I could have done differently, in the sense of, 'What if I had thrown this pitch or that pitch?' But I have to remember at that time, I was committed to those pitches and that's what felt right. It took a while to accept that. ... I think you take it as a learning thing and realize how lucky you are to be one of those eight teams in the entire country at the College World Series.
"But I just think [about] what we can do to be the final team -- the last one standing."
Perhaps with the last ace standing.