Nicole Murphy could see the potential for what was to come.
Maybe more accurately her premonition actually concerned how naturally her daughter, Camryn, would be able to make softballs leave fields.
“Growing up, I always used to kill the ball,” said Camryn, a 2022 Shaler graduate. “My mom actually put me, I never did tee ball, she put me right into rec ball because she was scared for the other girls. I was hitting the ball so hard. I completely skipped that stage and went right into slow pitch.”
Now a Seton Hill sophomore outfielder, Murphy is continuing to make a great case for trusting a mother’s intuition.
Murphy has clubbed 12 home runs and 46 RBIs, which are both best in the Griffins’ NCAA Division II Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference.
“She hits these nukes, as we call them, moonshots,” said second-year Seton Hill coach Cassie Moore. “She’s just got such a great swing. She’s great, a really great competitor, too. She’ll hit triples. She’ll hit doubles. She hit a triple [Wednesday], she just gets up off the base and she’s fired up. She fires up her teammates, too, when she does that.”
Murphy is hitting .395 with 12 doubles and three triples, with a 1.322 OPS and a .868 slugging percentage.
“I can thank my mom,” she said. “She’s the one who always took me on the field after long days of work. Every single time I get in a slump, she’s the first person I go to whenever I try to fix my swing and get back to myself. I do take pride in hitting home runs. It’s a really great feeling.”
And it’s a feeling that’s been spreading to her teammates.
Seton Hill leads the PSAC in nearly every statistical category at the plate. The Griffins hit a league-best .370 as a team, while their 306 runs, 360 hits, 78 doubles, 48 home runs and 275 RBIs are all tops in the PSAC.
Serra Catholic graduate Nina Grandey is hitting a team-high .448 for Seton Hill, while North Hills product Kassidy Witting is hitting .444 and Moon native Morgan Toal is hitting .416.
Junior Grace Paredes has also hit 11 home runs and 38 RBIs for the Griffins, while Penn-Trafford graduate Brooke Cleland has seven homers to her credit.
There is no doubt Murphy’s success has been a catalyst for Seton Hill (25-9, 13-3), which currently sits in first place in the PSAC West Division standings, Moore said.
“She is just a wonderful teammate,” Moore said. “We talk all the time as a team that if you can’t be a leader off the field, then you can’t be a leader on the field. It just doesn’t translate. She’s just a great example of that.
“When we have practice, you never see her standing around talking. She’s setting up practice. She’s always pulling her weight. She’s a superstar, but she doesn’t act like one.”
After hitting 13 home runs as a senior at Shaler, Murphy matriculated to Seton Hill where she hit .300 with 10 doubles, nine home runs and 28 RBIs as a freshman last spring.
“I struggled very much in the beginning of the fall my freshman year,” Murphy said. “I was nervous coming to a new team and college, obviously. I think I struck out every single game in the fall season to where coach had to pull me and just put me in the field because I was successful in the field but not my at-bats.”
Then Murphy hit her first collegiate home run last March during Seton Hill’s victory against Wheeling in Clermont, Fla.
“That’s when it all broke out,” she said. “That’s when I was like, ‘I belong. I belong on this field.’”
Despite Murphy’s perceived slow start to her collegiate career, Moore said she always had faith in her bat.
“She has a beautiful swing,” Moore said. “We’ve done nothing. We just let Cam be Cam. That’s what I told the girls, too, this year, again, it’s not just with Cam, it’s with everybody — when I came in it wasn’t that we did all these crazy hitting drills and that’s what worked. It just was more so the belief in yourself and your teammates. That’s kind of been our secret sauce, that belief in yourself.”
Moore’s belief in Murphy as what she called a “true utility player” – one who can pitch, catch and play in the infield and outfield – has also been critical to the Griffins’ success.
Though she has found a home in right field this season, Murphy’s versatility has made her easy to pencil into the lineup every game, Moore said.
“She has a cannon for an arm,” the coach said. “That was one change we made this year. Last year, she started in left field and this year I kind of had the epiphany, I’m like, ‘Cam’s arm she needs to be in right.’ Since then, she throws runners out at first. Whenever we have a runner tagging at second, it happened twice [Wednesday], the whole team was like, ‘Go, go’ because we just want to see Cam throw a strike to third.”
Murphy said she also leans on her range in the outfield to provide an edge defensively.
“I always play my position to where I know I can cover the line, cover the gap, wherever the ball is hit,” she said.
Then there is Murphy’s secret weapon.
In the offseason, Murphy is an instructor at HOMEPL8 Softball Training in Hampton.
“She teaches all summer long to young girls,” Moore said. “A lot of people know when you teach something you really learn something, too. You reinforce what you already know. I think that also makes her a really great hitter. It’s just sharing that knowledge with her teammates and other people in the summer.”
Spreading her love for the game is something Murphy said she will never take for granted.
“Helping kids also helps me to know what I should work on or what I should focus on and what I can do to help with other kids,” she said. “I always love giving back to my community.”
And Moore is excited to see how much more Murphy can develop during her tenure at Seton Hill.
“I don’t want to jinx her, I really don’t but our coaching staff has talked about she could be player of the year at least by the end of her senior year,” Moore said. “She’s that good.”
John is a copy editor and page designer at the Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at jsanta@unionprogress.com.