Teachers and students walking the hallways around the campus at Empire High School at any point during the school day are likely to see a bubbly, grinning, laughing Brittany Woolridge.
But unless they have walked past the football field — beyond the back lot to the softball field on game night — during the last three years, they haven’t seen the real Woolridge.
“She’s always been very competitive,” said Shannon Woolridge, Empire’s softball coach and Brittany’s father. “As a pitcher, you have to have that mindset, you have to want the ball. Throughout the majority of her career, she’s done that.”
As senior catcher Bailey Rominger squatted behind home plate before Empire’s season opener in front of a home crowd Tuesday night, memories from the past three years flooded in for both her and her battery mate.
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“I don’t know why, but the nerves started to kick in,” said Woolridge, who is signed to pitch at Texas A&M-Commerce next year. “I came to the realization that it’s my last first home game as an Empire Raven.”
Romiger has enjoyed playing behind the plate, as it’s offered a different perspective, the kind that allowed her to regain her focus and look up to see a bulldog in the circle only she could recognize — nothing like the Woolridge viewed during school hours.
“It’s ruthless,” said Rominger, who has called the pitches the last three seasons. “She’s ready to throw any pitch as hard as she possibly can with whatever she’s got.
“She goes all out, and it’s great to have someone out there who is willing to put everything they have into a game.”
For Woolridge, it’s not a switch, but more of a transformation — one that began after Empire lost to eventual state champion Winslow in the Division III quarterfinals last spring.
Woolridge has been around the game all her life: She was a batgirl at age 6, and took her first pitching lesson a year later.
She knows softball is a team sport, but she partly blames herself for being eliminated from the postseason.
“I was mad at myself,” Woolridge said. “I sort of felt like I let my team down. I wasn’t prepared. There was a lot going on, and I just wasn’t prepared. A lot of that was my fault. I came to the realization I needed to work harder.”
Woolridge, who has 42 career wins along with 319 strikeouts, works at a frenetic pace inside the circle, causing confusion with rise, screw and curve balls zooming from her right arm.
With each strikeout — after she peppers in “good jobs” directed toward Rominger — Woolridge lets her competitiveness get the better of her, roaring with the kind of excitement that suggests softball is more than just a game. It’s helped her deal with any hardships or struggles over the last few years.
“I can’t express how much this game means to me and what it’s done for me,” she said. “I lost myself; I gave up and didn’t know what to do. Softball just really helped me through all those things; pitching just really helped me just find myself. Pitching is my calling. It really calms me, and it’s changed me for the better.”
