Georgina Corrick a budding softball legend

He came across Georgina Corrick by accident. University of South Florida and Team USA softball coach Ken Eriksen was attending an 18-and-under game to scout another player but was shocked by the 5-foot-11 hurler absolutely dominating batters.

“This [kid] on the mound was doing things and I thought, ‘That’s pretty special. I wonder where she’s going next year?'” Eriksen told me.

So, he sidled up to the coach and asked, pointing to the mound.

“You talking about George?” the coach asked. “Yeah, she’s 13, 14. She’s just gonna be a freshman in high school.”

Eriksen couldn’t believe it. Far from entering college, Corrick had never even stepped foot in a high school classroom.

There was only one name that came to mind when he saw her:

The numbers were always good. Corrick, who graduated with a degree in marine biology and conservation science but was granted a fifth year of eligibility because of Covid, entered this year with a career 1.24 ERA and 884 strikeouts in just 711 1/3 innings pitched. She had thrown six no-hitters and racked up accolades, from being a 16-time conference pitcher of the week to an academic All-American.

This year, she’s found another level. If you thought what Jacob deGrom was doing before he got hurt last year was special, Corrick has him beat.

Through 20 appearances entering Wednesday’s action, Corrick has thrown 111 innings, striking out 169 batters and allowing only 35 hits. She threw an 11-inning, 19-strikeout shutout and a few weeks later followed that with the first perfect game of her career and just the fourth in USF history. Seven batters have drawn a walk against her and, perhaps even more astonishing, she’s allowed one — just one — run in all that time, giving her a sparkling ERA of 0.06. She’s now closing in on Danielle Henderson’s 105 consecutive scoreless innings streak.

While the numbers are eye-popping, this is the kind of performance that the witty and introspective Corrick expects from herself.

“I never really thought about it until people started making quite a big deal about how low the ERA is or the strikeout numbers or the innings pitched,” Corrick said in a recent phone call. “Because that’s just the norm around here. It’s just me coming to my job and doing it every single day. It’s like if people made a really big deal about the fact that you drove to work that day,” she said with a laugh.

Even more frightening for the opposition? Corrick doesn’t feel like she’s necessarily been in the zone, admitting that most days she goes out to the mound she doesn’t have her best stuff. What? How is that even possible?

“You look at a normal distribution curve, the vast majority of the time I’m having ‘B’ and ‘C’ days,” Corrick said. “But the good news is we’ve learned how to not beat ourselves up. It’s taken me a long time to settle into the fact that it’s OK to throw on a ‘B’ day, it’s OK to to only have two or three working pitches that day because that’s the reality of our game. Same as a hitter who comes up and hits 1-for-3 that day and is still considered a phenomenal hitter.”

Don’t assume that her attitude means she lacks that killer instinct. Just like all the best athletes, her drive to win is paramount.

“I get personal vendettas and I’ll pick one or two people in a lineup and be like, ‘This person doesn’t beat me,'” Corrick said. “I’ve never met her before, I’m sure she’s a really nice gal, I have nothing against her. But it’s fun to pick somebody and be like, ‘That’s my competitor today, that’s who I don’t lose to in the circle.'”

While Corrick gets the accolades for those dazzling numbers, she’s quick to credit the team behind her. She speaks glowingly of infielders like Dezarae Maldonado, Alanah Rivera and Megan Pierro, thanking them for always picking up the slack whenever a rare batter puts the ball in play.

“Those perfect games, those no-hitters, some of those stats, those don’t exist without the strength of defense that we’ve had,” Corrick said. (She also credits her teammates for keeping her in check, too. “They are really great about waking up every single morning and being like, ‘Oh, you think you’re hot? Look at this great picture that I took of you sitting on the floor eating a banana,'” she joked.)

The ace saves her biggest postgame hug for her catcher, Josie Foreman. They call their own games — something that coach Eriksen stresses in his programs. There are no wristbands here — and they work together to carve up opposing batters.

“We talk a lot about varying pressures, varying grips, in order to take a little bit of speed off or get a break in a slightly different way,” Corrick said. “I see that the girl has a little bit of lift in her swing, and I’m like, ‘Well, all I need to do is throw a cutter that rises a little bit and she’ll miss it every time.’ We do a really great job of adjusting to that.”

“I’m gonna relate her to John Smoltz,” Eriksen said. “Smoltz had a great fastball, a great slider, a great changeup and he could paint a picture on the mound. That’s what she has. John’s a very intelligent pitcher when you listen to him speak. She’s in that mold, where she takes a look at an opponent and she’s going to try and pick apart that opponent and annihilate that opponent with certain pitches.”

This career is something neither of her parents could have predicted. Both are from England, where Corrick was born before moving to the United States as an infant, and neither had much interest in or knowledge of baseball or softball. Instead, her father first tried to get her into soccer — because that was his favorite sport and also because he “wanted me to just get out of the house,” Corrick joked.

Early on, you never would have expected Corrick to become a world-class athlete.

“I was a little bit chubby back then and I wasn’t the best at running after the ball, so they made me a goalie,” Corrick said. “But the thing was, I had a very, very low attention span. So, I would sit down in the goal, and be playing with flowers — I’d make flower crowns and chains. A lot of people scored goals because I was just sitting there not paying a lot of attention.”

Next came swimming, but it turned out, “I wasn’t very buoyant at all. I had a couple of drowning scares.”

Finally, after seeing an ad for the local rec league in her newspaper, her dad begged her to try out.

“He was like, ‘Please, please give it a shot,'” Corrick remembered with a laugh. “‘I think you’d like it. You have so much pent-up anger. Please use it.'”

It was the right decision. Since then, Corrick has not only dominated for her school, but on the international front. She joined up with Great Britain’s U19 softball team and led it to its first European fastpitch gold medal at the 2016 European Junior Championship in Spain.

This past summer, Coach Eriksen invited her to train with Team USA as it prepared for the Tokyo Olympics. While there, she learned from and faced the greats like Cat Osterman, who even gave the young USF pitcher an impromptu mechanics lesson during their time together. Then Corrick took the mound in a scrimmage against the eventual silver medal-winning Team USA and, just like she’s done all year, dominated.

“The worst thing that happened was that George pitched against us in an exhibition game and [colorful euphemism for ‘beat us badly’],” Erikson said. “I’m looking around going, ‘OK, guys, this is a great challenge for the Olympics. That’s what we’re getting ready for.’ She’s pretty good.”

In her final college season, Corrick has plenty more she wants to accomplish. She is looking forward to the start of conference play and the postseason, where she hopes USF can make some noise. She’ll stay at USF next year to complete her master’s work and may help out with the softball team from the coaching side, getting to tackle the sport from another viewpoint. She’ll be in Barcelona this summer with Great Britain and she may explore her options in the pro game, even though the opportunities are more limited than one would hope. But then her sights are set on her biggest dream of all: The 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“Obviously, it hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we’re hoping that with the upward swing that softball has been on recently with viewership and popularity, that hopefully it’s picked up for 2028 in L.A. That’s always been my goal. Since I was little, I wanted to go to the Olympics.”

By that point, she may be one of the greats in softball history.

“She has the potential to be [one of the greatest players],” Eriksen said. “I think it’s unfair to say like at age 22, 23 she is one of the greatest at this point, because the greatest actually started getting really, really good around this age. And then the prime age is between 25 and 30. So, the longer she stays in this game, she has a chance to be one of the best and greatest international pitchers of all time. In my opinion, no question.”