Every sport at Alabama has its go-to player. For football, it was Trent Richardson; for basketball, JaMychal Green; for gymnastics, Geralen Stack-Eaton and Ashley Priess. For the softball team, that player is sophomore ace pitcher Jackie Traina.
Traina has been a dominant force for the Tide ever since she arrived on campus. As a freshman, she immediately contributed on the mound behind senior Kelsi Dunne, going 19-5 en route to a 1.70 ERA over the course of the year, even helping the Tide get to the Women’s College World Series.
She hasn’t experienced a sophomore slump, either. Traina has been exceptionally impressive in her role as ace pitcher for the Tide this year. So far this season, she has amassed a 27-1 record, a 1.56 ERA and 229 strikeouts, leading the Tide to its current 42-4 record. If anyone on the team could speak to Traina’s dominance, it would be senior catcher Kendall Dawson, who spends the majority of games behind the plate catching heat from her. “She’s hard to catch because her ball moves and she throws hard,” Dawson said. “I definitely have to keep a pad in my glove [because] she does throw really hard. My index finger gets really swollen and hurts all the time.” That power hasn’t gone unnoticed by the other players. Because of her powerful pitching style, Traina has earned a moniker among her teammates: the J-Train. “She’s kind of like a train; she’s so strong,” Dawson said. “Everybody’s afraid of her. I would say a lot of people fear the J-Train.” Dawson said Traina’s power on the mound isn’t the only things that make her so valuable to the team. A major aspect of Traina’s dominance, Dawson said, is her composure. Throughout the game, she is calm, focused and exceptionally hard to rattle. “She’s very competitive, but she’s very composed,” Dawson said. “[She’s] never going to get rocked. She’s never going [to] let it show when she’s frustrated ‘cause she’s just not that kind of person. It takes a lot to really get her off her game.”
Traina said composure comes easy to her because she treats each pitch and game as a separate entity. “People say, ‘Do you have pressure on you?’” Traina said. “It doesn’t really put pressure on me because I try not to look ahead. I try to keep the blinders on and look at it each pitch at a time, each game at a time. Because I feel if I do look ahead, it is going to be a little bit difficult. I have all the confidence in the world.” Traina demonstrated that composure Thursday when the Tide lost the first game of a three-game series against the No. 13 Georgia Bulldogs. Despite giving up seven runs in the first two innings, Traina stayed in the full six innings, holding the Bulldogs scoreless in the last four. “Baseball and softball are totally mental games,” Crimson Tide head softball coach Patrick Murphy said. “If you bat .300, you fail seven out of 10 times. It’s the kids that can deal with the failures that are doing well. If you give up a homerun as a pitcher, it either makes or breaks you. And she doesn’t let it bother her.” Still, Traina said she is not overly serious about the game and her life is not all about softball. She said she tries to tell jokes and keep people from being too caught up in the game — and when she’s not on the diamond, she doesn’t think about the game at all. For Murphy, that is another valuable trait he sees in Traina. “Softball is kind of what she does, but it’s not who she is,” Murphy said. “That’s a great attitude to have. ‘Cause it kind of engulfs you. And I don’t think she’s like that. I don’t think she stands in her own way.” As Alabama looks to finish out the rest of the season, the team will continue to rely on Traina to help carry them to what could be Alabama’s first national championship in softball. “She’s been a great teammate,” Murphy said. “She works hard in the weight room [and] practices. She’s a great kid. If she was Richardson or [Mark Ingram] playing football, she’d be up for the Heisman.”
