From 2017 to 2020, there were rules — developed independently but often uniformly by softball coaches around the Omaha area — around facing Jordy Bahl. They applied to few, if any, other pitchers.
The process often started in batting practice before a team had to play Papillion-La Vista by cranking the speed of the pitching machine as high as it could go and moving it closer to the plate. When facing Bahl, a daunting, snarling bulldog in the circle, hitters were instructed to be aggressive early in counts. She was going to attack the zone, and it was best to jump on something straight before she got to two strikes.
It all required a heightened level of concentration. Bahl didn’t make many mistakes. Opponents couldn’t afford to miss their opportunity when she left something hittable over the plate.
Did any of it work?
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“My kids always tell me that, ‘Hey, I got a hit off of her, and I got a hit off of her,’” Millard South coach Steve Kerkman said. “I don’t remember. I just remember those Papio teams, that we didn’t get run-ruled and we were pretty happy about that.”
Said Gretna coach Bill Heard: “It got to the point where you weren’t gonna beat her, and you didn’t want it to affect you going forward. Like you almost just flush that game, didn’t allow her to beat you twice.”
Even before her return to the state in July, Bahl was a legendary figure in the world of Nebraska softball. She committed to NU before she had thrown a pitch in high school. In her four years at Papio, the Monarchs won three state championships while she went 95-3 with a 0.63 ERA. She was 54-0 in her final two years of high school, allowing five runs in 276 innings.
Opposing coaches saw a player unlike any other that had come through the state before, a dominant two-way force that, even as a teenager, transcended normalcy and convention.
“I’ve never seen a kid that was that dialed in, and every single pitch, you got her best effort,” Millard West coach Don Brummer said. “Every time she threw the ball. She was just very tenacious out there, very intimidating.”
From early on in her high school career, Bahl had a certain focused competitiveness that radiated from the circle, an intangible yet palpable presence that went hand-in-hand with her intimidating demeanor and power pitching style.
“That circle is hers, and everybody knows it,” Brummer said. “The way she walks out there, the way she conducts herself in the circle, it just shoots right out at you. It’s kinda hard to describe unless you actually watch it. Then you go, ‘Oh, I get it.’ It’s pretty amazing.”
In those early seasons, Bahl relied heavily on velocity; she threw so hard that she could often blow pitches by hitters. As she got older, she evolved. After the low point in her career, a pair of losses to Lincoln Southwest in the state championship as a sophomore, she learned to rely more on her secondary pitches, eventually combining her power with a reliable changeup and drop-ball. Even as she could only improve by degrees, she got better. Her control improved as a senior, walking 15 batters, a career low, while striking out 316, the most of her four years.
“She’s always been kind of a dominant figure, but once she got her changeup and drop ball developed really good, along with her rise, then she was almost unhittable at that point,” Marian coach Chad Perkins said.
It all helped establish what Bahl became on the field in the eyes of opposing coaches: a ruthlessly efficient softball machine reinventing itself, impervious to any approach, gameplan or adjustments from hitters. The rumblings of greatness began before her freshman year. Kerkman heard from a club coach there was a kid “that’s gonna be better than anybody.”
Everything Bahl did on the field, every no-hitter, every tape-measure home run she hit while batting .504, every quietly athletic play that appeared less impressive than it was because of how easy she made it look, fed into the sense of wonder she inspired.
She was an omnipresent figure in the world of Nebraska softball. In middle school, she went to camps at high schools all over the area. Playing travel ball in the Nebraska Gold program connected her with other players and coaches. When her brother’s football team practiced on the grass next to the Millard South softball field, she threw in the bullpen.
Being constantly around softball served as a precursor to the ambassador of the game Bahl would later become as she gained fame in college. Years away from coming back to help at Papillion and Nebraska Gold clinics, she built connections as a person who played softball, a personable, humble high schooler different from the competitor on the mound glaring at hitters from behind a metal cage and thick eye black.
“There’s softball players that kind of transcend the game a little bit that all the coaches know, and they know all the coaches,” Kerkman said. “It’s just kind of a unique blend, so you can see them at a basketball game, and Jordy’s gonna come talk to you or whoever it might be. They’re gonna come talk to you, and you’re gonna have a conversation. A lot of times with rivals it’s, ‘Oh, she’s my rival,’ but they just kind of transcend that where just everybody knows her and she knows everybody.”
Meanwhile, her pitching elevated to a level somewhere beyond dominant. She allowed more than three hits twice over her last two years of high school. Her final start for Papillion was a perfect game against North Platte.
While facing Marian in the early round of a tournament in 2019, Papillion-La Vista scored a pair of runs off Crusader ace Maddia Groff in the first inning. Perkins pulled Groff from the game. There was no point in using his top pitcher while trailing against Bahl. The loss was guaranteed as soon as Marian fell behind.
The Crusaders didn’t score in their last 26 innings against Bahl, spanning her junior and senior seasons.
For any opponent, there were two main ways of scoring against her: taking advantage of errors or hitting home runs. Stringing together enough hits for a traditional rally wasn’t plausible.
Gretna scored two of the five runs she allowed in her last two years on homers from hitters who went on to play Division I college softball. Current Husker Billie Andrews was geared up to hit a fastball in 2019 when she caught a changeup in front of the plate and hooked it inside the left-field foul pole. A year later, catcher Jenna Marshall, now at Nebraska-Omaha, hit a drop ball over the center-field fence.
“You’re not expecting it,” Heard said. “I can tell you this, we were positive (of) our approach with both of those balls. The kids tried to do what we asked them to do.”
When Bahl announced her decision to transfer to Nebraska for her last two years of college, it was more than an impactful portal addition for a program trying to win its first Women’s College World Series. It was one of the most dominant athletes in the history of the state returning to where it all began, where the seeds were sown for the pitcher who led Oklahoma to a pair of championships.
In the spring, it will come full circle, her former opponents now watching from a distance as the journey continues.
“There’s more anticipation for anticipation and excitement for where it can go because she has constantly elevated her game since she was younger,” Kerkman said. “And just to see where it can go, I think, is even more exciting than her accomplishments.”