Aubree Murphy’s piercing sky blue eyes flicker with excitement when she describes her 9-year-old sister Michaela.
Michaela, a brown belt in karate, storms around Murphy’s Jupiter home with practice nunchucks and her “fiery Irish eyes,” as Aubree puts it.
“She’s so competitive it’s scary,” explained Aubree, a record-breaking senior pitcher on King’s Academy’s softball team, adding that Michaela even becomes infuriated when she loses coin tosses. “I’ve never seen someone close to being like her.”
Apparently Aubree hasn’t looked in the mirror lately. Murphy, a right-handed power pitcher, bundles all kinds of furious, competitive energy into what she calls her “5-foot-5 on a good day” frame.
Last week, Murphy passed 400 career strikeouts and hit 402, a number she spits out faster than she blinks. And after exhaustive and oftentimes frustrating research, King’s coach Tim Willcox discovered his ace also had the lowest career earned-run average (0.63) in program history.
As she’s posted career marks, Murphy’s helped turn King’s (8-3) into a legitimate state-tournament contender in Class 3A. The Lions reached the region quarterfinals last season and won the regular-season district title.
She struck out 167 batters in 2011, and already has 79 punchouts this spring.
“It’s confidence and fire in the belly,” Willcox said. “She has it. I rarely talk to her during games. I don’t need to.”
That drive is what Murphy needed after her sophomore season, which was cut short because of a broken bone and torn ligament in the index finger of her pitching hand. Murphy said her pitching style was improperly wrenching her hand.
“It ended my world,” Murphy said.
Burnt out and injured, she considered quitting the game. After straining through the grind of year-round softball, she said, a devastating finger injury must’ve been a sign from God.
“I’m a big believer in signs,” she explained. “I thought I was being told to get my life in order and move on.”
Missing summer ball, especially between sophomore and junior year, a critical time for college recruiters, meant seriously risking her college softball hopes.
She joined the drum corps at school and played the bass drum, but it didn’t take long to rekindle the softball flame once her junior year started.
“All I wanted to do was go out and throw,” Murphy said. “I never knew I could hate something so much and then fall in love with it all over again.”
Murphy started working out in the family gym at home, pumping out leg presses “until I couldn’t walk.” She’d run as far as the beach – her original goal – and keep going. She threw 80 pitches a day, every day, for four months.
Then she bulled her way through one of the best seasons in the area, statistically aligning herself with big-school, big-name pitchers like Gardens’ Kaylie Wallace.
Her landing leg felt “like a brick wall” during her delivery and her screwballs over the summer hit 62 and 63 mph.
Then she signed a scholarship with Daytona State with the hopes of playing two years and signing with a Division I program.
All that came because of the Irish fire that seriously burns every time she steps on a softball field. It runs in the family.
“My pitching coach told my dad when I was 10 or 11 that pitching wasn’t for everyone and I should think about other positions,” Murphy said. “I made it my goal – no, my job – to prove them wrong.”
