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Walking out to the Tampa Spartans’ softball field, Heather Van Landingham and Deanna Henriott are all smiles, talking and laughing the whole way.
“She’s my friend,” Van Landingham said of Henriott. But these two have much more in common than just friendship.
For one thing, both girls are the ace pitchers for the nationally-ranked UT softball team. They chose this school for similar reasons.
“I really liked this school when I came,” Van Landingham said. “I got a good feel for it. I know they had a good business school. And also recruiting. I liked the coaches. The pitching coach [Jaci Davis] is really, really good.”
“I liked how small the school is,” said Henriott, who broke the school’s strikeout record in 2008 with 251. “And it was close to home, but far enough away to where I was on my own during the week. I really liked the coaches and how they coached everyone.”
Van Landingham, now a junior, showed Henriott, currently a sophomore, the ropes when the latter arrived in 2008.
“I tried to be a mentor,” Van Landingham said. “I don’t know how good of a job I did. [Laughs] But I tried to tell her how everything was here and take her under my wing.”
Each can also say she has done a good job on the mound for the Spartans this season. Through Mar. 28, Van Landingham is 7-2 with a 2.23 ERA, while Henriott is one of the conference’s best pitchers at 13-4 with her ERA at 0.85.
“Right now, she’s healthier than me,” Van Landingham admitted. “So right now she is dominating more than I am.”
Head Coach Leslie Kanter still praises her pitchers equally.
“They’re probably the strongest one and two pitchers in our conference,” Kanter said. “I don’t think there is another team that has two top pitchers like we do. We had it last year, but it’s even better this year because we have a better team behind them. It’s not usual that you can go from game to game and feel just as confident with each pitcher as you do with the other.”
“If we’re not feeling it one day or our stuff isn’t working, we don’t have to freak out because we’re going to lose,” Van Landingham said. “We know we have somebody behind us.”
They are both talented pitchers, but are they the same pitcher in two different bodies?
“We’re pretty much the same, I would say in almost everything,” Van Landingham said. “Our speed, how our ball breaks. Overall we’re the same.”
Not so, Kanter claims.
“The difference is, Heather wears her feelings on her sleeve,” Kanter said. “When she gets mad about something you can see it. Deanna doesn’t. However, they’re both very good pitchers and I have a lot of confidence in both of them. But they’re definitely different. They’re not the same.”
Of course, however, they can always lay claim to that one common bond: their friendship.
“We’re close as friends,” Van Landingham said. “So it helps that she’s always going to have my back no matter what. We don’t get mad at each other for it. We don’t hate each other. [Laughs] If she’s doing better than me, I’m not going to have any animosity toward her.”
“Yes, we’re definitely friends,” Henriott added.
“They’ve always gotten along,” Kanter said. “They get along great. They back each other, they cheer for each other in the dugout. If one of them is not doing well and the other goes in for her, she’s fine. Their personalities are such that they’re very happy people. They’re fun, they want to play, they want to win. They both would pitch every game if they could.”
They also like how this bond spreads through to the entire team and helps them win with teamwork and group leadership.
“We have very, very good chemistry this year,” Van Landingham said. “We don’t have the cliques. Everybody pretty much gets along with everybody else. So it helps a lot on the field.”
“We have relied on our seniors to be our leaders,” Kanter said. “It’s everyone else that has to get going and score some runs for [our pitchers] and play defense behind them. So I think those are more our leaders as far as getting the team going. But Heather and Deanna are leaders too because if we don’t have good pitching, we’re not going to win the game. That’s how it is.”
Through Mar. 28, the Spartans are 21-6 on the season. Their success has started and ended in the pitcher’s circle, where friends have become aces and aces have become winners.
-Brenton Burkett
Brenton can be reached at bburkett@ut.edu
While the ending of school may disconnect a student from the Tampa mentality, the same vacation is the beginning of crunch time for baseball and softball. I realize that this site hasn’t been posted on in four weeks, but that’s nothing compared to the four years it has taken the softball team to get back to the NCAA South Regional Tournament.
Head coach Leslie Kanter would be likely to say that the 31-11 record is due highly to team effort, which is what she has told every Minaret reporter who has conducted an interview. As true as this may be, there have been some superstars on this team.
Many game’s fate has been decided by the pitching staff. A sophomore and a freshman. Heather VanLandin and Deanna Henriott had a combine 324 strikeouts on the season. Henriott played over 190 innings maintaining a 1.65 ERA. VanLandingham controlled the mound just under 100 innings and pitched a solid 2.31 ERA in the regular season.
Of course there are other contributing factors, but look for Tampa’s pitching to give them the edge in the postseason starting May 7 at Miami’s Barry University.
But now we shift to the male version of America’s favorite pastime. The third ranked Spartans closed out the regular season topping the Sunshine State Conference, good news that could only be shattered by the announcement of the NCAA South Regional Tournament host being anything but, “The University of Tampa.” The players and head coach Joe Urso have expressed the importance of the home field edge.
If home field advantage is granted, the Spartans should have no trouble. Urso showed awareness of Tusculum College seeking revenge after last season’s defeat in the same tournament. The No. two seed in the region sits second only to Tampa, and has numerous players from last year’s squad returning for another shot at our defending national champs.
But the Spartans have something the Pioneers didn’t see all season – a competitive conference. The SSC has overall taken every school to a finer tier of play. Tampa snuck through nearly untouched last season with a 20-4 record, but this year has struggled slightly with a 17-7 showing.
This is not for lack of talent. The Tampa Spartans are peaking, and played like a national championship team in the second half of the season. If this continues into the postseason, then a program already well-versed in tradition will write new pages of history.
- Bobby Winsler
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