CLARK WINDMILLS HERSELF TOWARDS GREATNESS

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Kaci Clark does not wear her heart on her sleeve.

Look a little lower down, however, on the right elbow which serves as the fulcrum for the finest pitching arm in the Women's Professional Softball League (WPSL).

On that pitching arm, right at the tip of the elbow, is perhaps the angriest scar this side of a 70s-era knee surgery.

In 1992, just before heading to her freshman year at Georgia State University, she slid hard into third base in a game and was tagged equally hard on that right elbow. The ensuing reconstructive surgery was as complex as any which is done on any big-league baseball player.

"It snapped off the tip of my elbow, ripped off the tricep tendon" -- here she motions up and down her right arm -- "broke it here, and here, and jammed the rest of the muscle up in here."

In other words, it was the kind of Tommy John-esque reconstrictive surgery which would require not only technology and therapy, but a little luck.

"The first doctor told me I wouldn't pitch again," Clark said. "It took great physical therapy and a great orthopedist back home in Nashville to get back."

Clark may have had some doubts about whether she could continue playing the game she loved in the WPSL, given the yearly task of playing in a six-team league.

"Even though the number of games can be similar on any weekend (between college and pro ball), the season is longer, and you play longer games, and you play every day, so it's much harder on a body," Clark says. "When you finish your two doubleheaders in college ball, you get the whole week to rest up."

But she pitches just about every other game for the Roadsters, and when she does, she is the very best. She won the league MVP and the award for the league's best pitcher in 1999. She had also won honors as league's best pitcher in 1998 while playing for the Orlando Wahoos.

Clark's secret is not just her velocity, nor her patented rising fastball. Indeed, it is the intensity with which she pitches. In the circle, she is a swirl of arms and legs and black kneepads and cleats, as she hurls herself at batters and digs a pattern in the infield dirt which looks like a backwards question mark. It is difficult to pick up that day-glow yellow softball when it appears to be heading towards your chin out of the fury of Clark's form.

Despite her excellence and MVP form, Clark sees her job as a continuous struggle. Pitching every other day in a four-game series, opposing hitters get a second look at a pitcher that baseball teams never get.

"Playing so many games against only five other teams, you get to know each other better," she says. "As far as competition goes, that makes it tougher. A pitcher sees the same hitter over and over again, and you're thinking, 'OK, what am I going to throw them this time?' It's really tough to fool the same hitters with the same pitch. It makes it a lot harder."