August 16, 2007

Total. Team. Effort.

By Andrew Barlam
Signal Staff Writer

"If I had been the No. 4 hitter, too, maybe you could say that I won it all by myself. But I wasn't. And there's a good reason why I wasn't."

- Jordan Taylor

This might sound strange.

Crazy.

Shocking.

But Valencia High pitcher Jordan Taylor's senior season for the Vikings softball team might have been a little too good for her own good.

Maybe easing off a touch on the dominating would have been for the best.

The 32-0 record.

The 406 strikeouts.

The 0.19 earned run average.

The three straight 1-0 victories she willed her teammates toward to close out the CIF-Southern Section Division I playoffs with a championship.

They caused an awful lot of misconceptions.

"All season long I've been hearing about how 'Valencia only wins because of Jordan,'" Taylor says. "It's stupid. I hate it. It makes me angry.

"We had five DI players all season and a sixth verballed late in the year. I don't think I would have won a championship if I didn't have them."

Can't take a compliment?

Trying to play the modest superstar card?

She just wants the credit distributed more evenly.

The national champion Vikings have become easy to dismiss as a one-girl show. It's natural to forget, with the tight contests the Vikings had to survive during the playoffs, that the team was far from inept on offense.

The Vikings batted .339 and scored five runs per game.

The batting average is 32 points higher than Hart, the Division I runner-up.

The squad had four different players with averages above .400 and nine with plus-.300 marks. Then there are two others - outfielders Kristen Aidem (.296) and Torrie Anderson (.283) - who were both awfully close.

"They have a great lineup," says Hart head coach Steve Calendo. "Every at-bat, there's somebody coming up that you know could beat you."

Every one of the team's seven seniors will play college softball. In addition to Taylor (University of Michigan), there's Aidem (Michigan State), Anderson (Cal State Fullerton), Nicole Matson (Pacific), Alyssa Ishibashi (North Carolina State), April Rosas (Cal Lutheran) and Lauren Rose (College of the Canyons). And Rosas and Rose were not even starters.

Then there's University of Tennessee-commit Jessica Spigner, a junior starting third baseman, who was named to the CalHiSports.com All-State first team. She batted .418 with four home runs and 29 RBIs. Matson, the starting second baseman, was named to the All-CIF SS Division I first team, batting in the cleanup spot. She batted .412 with four homers in 26 RBIs.

Catcher Amy Moore joined them on the All-Foothill League first team.

Each, though, was overshadowed by Taylor.

The senior gave up runs in just eight out of 32 games.

She struck out double-digit batters in all but four of her starts.

Even Valencia's biggest offensive outburst of the season - a 22-0 blowout over Golden Valley in just five innings --was overshadowed by its pitcher. Taylor threw a perfect game, striking out all but two batters.

"Jordan gets a lot of the credit, and she deserves it," says Viking head coach Donna Lee. "The team is built around her. But she'll tell you the hero for us was always somebody different. Somebody was always stepping up."

Take Valencia's preseason tournaments, for instance.

If the Vikings lost even one game in any one of them - the Tournament of Champions, the Best of the West or the Michelle Carew Classic - they might not have held the distinction as the country's top-ranked team.

Against Canyon del Oro - the No. 1 ranked team at that time - in the Tournament of Champions finale, it was Spigner providing the heroics.

She hit a walk-off two-run home run in the seventh inning.

Against Pacifica of Garden Grove in the Michelle Carew Classic, it was Matson batting the Vikings to a comeback in the game's final inning.

Down by two runs, she hit a three-run homer.

"It was the hardest-hit ball I've ever seen in my life," Taylor said.

But the umpire said Matson failed to touch home plate.

So Spigner picked them both up with a walk-off single in extra innings.

"Jordan kept us in every game," Spigner said. "We couldn't have done anything without her. But softball is a team sport. Our lineup did its job."

Three different players had game-winning hits in the playoffs.

It was Anderson in the Vikings' opener, breaking the game open in the third inning with a grand slam. In the quarterfinals, it was Ishibashi, hitting a bases-loaded single to end a 10-inning deadlock. In the semifinals it was Aidem, knocking a third-inning single up the middle to plate the winner.

In the championship game it was Ishibashi again.

Her two-out RBI single in the fifth provided the offense.

Taylor took care of the rest, capping a historic season with a shutout.

Neither's play would have meant much without the other's.

"We're a team," Taylor said. "We did it together. This was my third year as the pitcher and the first time we won. It took every one of us to do this."