Addisen Fisher has cemented herself as the top recruit in this year’s high school softball senior class. The UCLA commit sits down with Sporting Her’s Jeff Cheshire to discuss how she made it to the top, and what it is like being there.
Addisen Fisher is already in your head. You don’t realise it yet, as you make your way to the batters box and take your stance. Then she unleashes her first pitch and your eyes light up. This one is there to hit. But wait a minute – she wants you to swing at this. It’s a challenge, though.
Do you really want to back down from it? So you swing and, as her drop ball falls from hip to knee height, you mis-hit it into the dirt. And while you take off, the third baseman has scooped up your ground ball and calmly delivered it to first base. You’re out. By the time you have processed any of that, you’re sitting in the dugout, watching the same thing happen to the next batter.
Three or four pitches later, you are back out on the field. Who needs three pitches to get a batter out, when you can do it in just one, anyway? It would seem a dangerous game, essentially daring batters to hit. But it is one Fisher is confident in, and one that has reaped rewards over the years. However good you think you are at hitting her pitch, she is confident she can throw it better.
”I think it’s just learning to trust my pitches,” Fisher says over a Zoom call, as she sits in her home in Bend, Oregon.
”For a while I was very focused on strikeouts and I wanted a huge number of strikeouts. Then I changed my mindset to, OK hit this pitch, hit it hard. It’s always a challenge with the batter.
”I trust my movement enough to know that if I throw it to start at the hip, it’ll finish probably down at the knees and they’ll either swing and miss, or hit a nice ground ball to my third baseman, and she’ll scoop it up and throw it to first and get her out.
”. . . I do like to mess with people. People say I look really scary when I’m pitching, I don’t understand it, apparently I look really mean when I’m pitching.
”I do like to mess with batters a little bit. I like to work really fast when I’m pitching. Sometimes I’ll change my cadence to catch them off balance. I like to have fun with it, too. It’s also fun to make batters look a little silly sometimes.”
That is not to say she cannot strike you out – she has amassed 600 strikeouts with a year remaining in her career with Bend High School. But on her Northwest Bullets 18U travel team, she has often had to carry the bulk of the pitching load in previous years. If she had to throw the majority of innings on days when her team was playing four or five games, completing a game in 60 pitches, rather than 100, saved her arm a lot over the course of a day.
It comes back to her philosophy of attacking her strengths and being efficient within that. That is evident in her variety of pitches, too. She has achieved everything with just three pitches, although a fourth – a curve ball – is on its way. Her drop ball is her bread and butter and her most deadly. She likes to throw that low inside, and it is that she gets a lot of mis-hits from. She also has a rise ball and a change up.
”I’ve had these three pitches, that’s what’s worked for me,” she said.
”I’m a firm believer in master pitches before you go on to the next, then you go on to another one. I have taken a lot of time to master the drop, and the change, and the rise. So I can throw them any spot, I can really hone in to how I want to throw them, if I want to throw it off speed, whatever.
”I think that’s what’s made me so successful with just three pitches, because I’ve worked really hard on just those three.”
And that success is nothing short of wild. She is ranked No1 in the 2024 recruiting class by Extra Innings, Softball America and Perfect Game. She won back-to-back Gatorade State Player of the Year awards in Oregon high school softball, as a freshman and sophomore, no less. She is an PGF All-American and was recently named to the United States under-18 team, where she is the star name among a team of stars.
There is her high school stats: the 600 strikeouts over three years and an ERA of 0.26. That is without even mentioning her 26 home runs and last year’s school record 0.657 batting average. And of course, there is the cherry on top – committing to her dream school, the 12-time national champion UCLA Bruins.
Yet amongst it all, she keeps her focus on having fun. She spends most of her time in the circle singing Taylor Swift songs in her head, and generally keeps her focus on enjoying herself. It so happens she plays best when she is in that mindset, too.
”I think for a lot of girls there’s a separation between playing because you’re having fun and finding fun in the competition. . . For girls that doesn’t really happen until later [older than boys].
”For me it happened at a really young age. I could not get enough of it. I loved competing, I loved playing.
”Everything I do I try to have fun. I’m always here for a good time. When I’m practicing, I’ll be complaining about something, because I’m a pitcher, and I’m like ‘wait I get to play softball, this is what I get to do, I don’t have to’.
”It’s just changing that mindset.”
Perhaps that feeds into the amount of time Fisher devotes to the sport. She has a fully-equipped pitching barn at home, which her family built themselves. She spends hours out there pitching and hitting. It also gives her a base to give lessons to younger girls, which she believes has helped her as a player. When she is not doing any of that, she spends most of her free-time thinking about softball. That would be tough if it was a chore. Certainly she would not be nearly as good as she is, if she was not devoting that sort of time to it.
But it is all what has helped her into that No1 recruit spot, which has fostered plenty of support from her local community. The sport is growing in Bend, a city of just over 100,000 people, and she is converting some of its residents to Bruin fans. It has not all been easy, though. Especially after first being ranked as the top recruit in 2022, she was met with negativity from further abroad.
”There was so much pressure, and it stressed me out. I would say it got to me a bit. There was a lot of negativity when I played other teams.
”There would be parents standing behind the dugout saying really mean things about me, things they’d never let anyone say about their daughter. So that was hard for me to wrap my mind around. I’ve always been taught, don’t be jealous just work harder. I had a hard time understanding why people did that for a while.
”So finally I learnt to let it go and there’s obviously a lot of pressure, there’s always going to be pressure. But pressure is a privilege and to have those expectations is a privilege because people believe that much of you. I think that’s really special.”
And while much of that attention has come from her work in the circle, she is no slouch in the batters box either. Fisher admits to loving hitting more than pitching. She hits lead-off for Bend High School, where she achieved that school record, and fourth in the line-up for her the Bullets. Opponents are usually just as excited to get her out, as they are to get a hit off her. It is something she feels helps her as a pitcher, too.
”In games as a pitcher and a catcher, catcher’s tend to be good hitters too, you know the strike zone better than everybody else. You see it, you’re physically touching the ball every play. You know what the umpires’ calling and what he’s not calling. Pitch selection is a big part of it.
”And just knowing what it’s like to be a pitcher, the approach of like here’s what I’m setting up with this pitch. You can look at a girl’s swing and see what she’s good at hitting. Same thing being a pitcher, you probably have a good idea of what’s going in the pitcher you’re hitting against’s mind.
”It really shocks me more pitchers don’t hit, I think it really helps.”
It is something she hopes she will be able to continue to do at UCLA, following the footsteps of pitching-hitting great Rachel Garcia. But it is just one thing she is looking forward to about finally getting to Los Angeles. She met with over 40 schools across four days, when recruiting opened on September 1, 2022. From there she scheduled five visits. Her first was to the three-time defending national champion Oklahoma Sooners. But after her second, to UCLA, she had the confirmation she needed to commit to the school she had always dreamed of.
She is part of a strong Bruin recruiting class, which also includes her Bullets and USA catcher Sofia Mujica. That excites her, as does working with “Coach I” (Kelly Inouye-Perez) and Lisa Fernandez, alongside joining the existing team. It had been an uncharacteristically rough start to the season for UCLA, holding a 3-4 record at the time of writing. But Fisher was confident in the team’s ability to bounce back, while just becoming even more excited to get there.
”Obviously it happens. Not everybody’s perfect.
”It’s making me more and more excited to get down there. My recruiting class, the class of 2024 that’s coming in, is a big power class, we have six recruits. I think we can make an immediate impact.
”I think UCLA has a great team now and over time they’re just going to get better. And it’s still the beginning of the season, there’s a lot of season left to go.”
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