Softball: Young pitchers shine for Panthers

With a contagious smile and an easygoing personality, Savannah King grew up just a few miles… With a contagious smile and an easygoing personality, Savannah King grew up just a few miles away from the Pacific Ocean and the Disneyland Resort near Anaheim, Calif. Tall and athletic, she dreamed of playing softball at an Ivy League college.

Meanwhile, Alexa Larkin’s softball career started more modestly.

The left-handed Latrobe High School graduate dominated the comparatively less competitive landscape of high school softball in southwestern Pennsylvania for four years before deciding to play collegiately in her home city.

While King and Larkin have taken significantly different paths to Pitt, the two freshmen pitchers now share the same goal: to help Pitt softball become one of the best teams in the country over the next four years.

Panthers head coach Holly Aprile, who took over leadership of the team in 2008 and has had the program steadily improving since, believes King and Larkin have the ability to take Pitt softball to new heights.

“Together, they’re a pretty solid foundation for our program,” Aprile said. “And if they can continue to learn and get better, they can help us take that step to the next level.”

For a program that only started in 1999 and has now recorded four consecutive winning seasons, that next level would be legitimately competing for conference and national championships.

King, 18, believes that having lofty goals is important but added that the Panthers cannot take shortcuts if they want to fulfill their ambitions.

“We want to take this program as far as we possibly can,” she said. “But it’s a game-by-game process of getting better every day in order to reach those ultimate goals.”

Having grown up over 2,000 miles apart, the two girls said that there was one common denominator in the pair ending up at Pitt: Aprile.

“Being from southern California, Pitt isn’t really well known, but I knew Coach through emailing, and she was awesome,” King said. “I would say that we’re both really close with her.”

Larkin, 19, agreed and said that Aprile’s personality made her decision to come to Pitt easy.

“Coach Holly and I were emailing back and forth for a while before I decided to come here. She was very personable and friendly, and she only made me want to come to Pitt more,” Larkin said.

However, the similarities in King’s and Larkin’s paths to Pitt end there.

King says she didn’t know much about the school or the city before she visited Pitt on what was supposed to be a trip to the East Coast to see Princeton and Penn.

“I was looking to experience something different for my four years of college, and I kind of came to Pitt on a whim,” King said. “I love it, but don’t get me wrong — I still want to live in California when I’m older — the weather is perfect.”

Larkin, on the other hand, was raised less than an hour’s drive away from Pitt and knew the school’s academic and athletic history well.

“Growing up, people in my high school were all Pitt fans, so I decided to visit here and fell in love with the school and the city,” she said. “It’s perfect for me because I get to be in the city, but I’m still close to home. So it’s pretty much a match made in heaven for me.”

With the pitching duo now a few months into their Pitt careers, Aprile said that having an experienced catcher like junior Holly Stevens behind the plate to work with King and Larkin has eased the pair’s transition to the next level.

“Our upperclassmen have been really supportive of them, and especially Holly [Stevens] behind the plate has done really well with both of them,” Aprile said.

Stevens said that having two lock-down pitchers like King and Larkin also helps the Panthers relax offensively because they know a few runs are all they need to win most games.

“All we ask of them is to consistently get outs and keep it close,” she said. “We know we aren’t the strongest hitting team, but we’re still capable of pushing a few runs across if they can keep us in games.”

Recently, an extremely difficult schedule in Big East play rudely welcomed the two freshmen to the conference with six consecutive losses.

But the pair responded to the adversity well and led the Panthers (20-17, 3-6 Big East) to a sweep of Providence last weekend. Looking to build off that momentum, Pitt now hosts Georgetown for a doubleheader at the Petersen Sports Complex this afternoon before facing DePaul and Syracuse in challenging back-to-back road series.

King ranks seventh among pitchers in the Big East with a 1.54 ERA. She has a 15-10 record on the year and has struck out 130 batters while walking 49. Larkin has a .291 ERA — 28th in the Big East — with a 5-7 record on the season. She has struck out 72 batters and walked 26.

Knowing that the future of the program relies heavily on their arms, both pitchers — who also live together as suite mates — said that having a good relationship and learning from each other has helped them improve.

“Even though we’re different, we still realize we’re in the same position of being a freshman pitcher coming in and needing to step our game up,” Larkin said. “We know that we’re there for each other and will support each other.”

King also said that the entire freshman class, which consists of seven girls from across the country, has developed a good relationship that should last for the next four years.

“All of the freshmen hang out a lot,” she said. “We see each other all of the time, and we are really close.”

King, Larkin and rest of the freshmen want to help the Pitt program move forward during their four years as Panthers.

“We want to take it all the way,” King said with a smile.