Kim Jeffs demonstrates her style. Photo by Advanced Photo.
When most college softball players think about the weather, they’re wondering if the rain will stop so they can get today’s game in, or if the sun will be in their eyes on the pop-ups. Kim Jeffs thinks about the weather because, well, she’d rather think about weather than just about anything else.
A junior meteorology major, Jeffs is the ace of the pitching staff for the Plymouth State softball team. Jeffs is not your average pitcher, though. She’s earned Third Team and First Team All-America honors her first two seasons at PSU, leading the nation in Division III in strikeouts both seasons. She was in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd” section two years ago after she led the nation in strikeouts as a first-year student. She’s set dozens of school records as well as a few NCAA national records for strikeouts and in fact, she’s on track to strike out more batters than anyone who’s ever pitched at an NCAA Division III school—all before the end of her junior year.
Quiet, shy and almost embarrassed describes Jeffs’ reaction to her tremendous success on the softball field. She’s practically uncomfortable with it, but you wouldn’t know it by the never-ending smile on her face. She’s having a ball out there, but to her it’s about having fun with the team, not about the number of batters she whiffs.
“She’s the ultimate team player,” says Harry Blood ’74, Panther head coach during Jeffs’ first two seasons. “She had only one year of varsity pitching under her belt before she got here, but she was accepted by our players more so than on any other team. She’s happy to just be part of the team, just one of the cogs in the wheel.”
“My team seems to get excited when I strike out a lot of people, but they do me the favor of not telling me because they know that’s the way I am,” says Jeffs. “I know when I watch a Red Sox pitcher and he strikes out a lot I get excited, so I’m sure my teammates can relate to that feeling.”
Jeffs has led the Panthers to two of the most successful seasons in school history, including 2003, when the team won the ECAC New England championship and finished with a 30-9 record. She’s matched an NCAA national record with 20 strikeouts in one eight-inning game, and she got 19 out of 21 outs via the whiff in another contest.
“I know it must sound ridiculous, but I don’t think about the statistics at all,” says Jeffs. “I don’t really care. I was talking with a teammate about athletes who use statistics, and how it can very much change their performance. If you’re out going for that 200th strikeout or this record or that record, it changes the way you think: you’re not team oriented, you’re personally oriented. If it was an individual sport, that would be fine, but it’s not. It’s a team sport, and team camaraderie is important. There’s a fine line that balances healthy competition and fun, and knowing they should go together.”
As successful as she’s been on the diamond and with her teammates, Kim Jeffs is not about softball. Kim Jeffs is much more about the weather. She may not know how many batters she’s struck out, but she knows the news anchors on the Weather Channel. She only knows of the pitching records she’s set because people tell her, but she’d drop it all in a second if it interfered with her academics.
Jeffs has been pitching a softball since she was six years old, but she’s been a weather fanatic since she was four. That’s when she swiped a book from her older brother that had big colorful pictures and big words she didn’t comprehend. The book was titled A Golden Guide: Weather.
“It’s actually a book that would be helpful to me now, it was that far advanced,” says Jeffs. “It had these big words I didn’t know, but I didn’t care. It was a meteorology guide to weather. I would read it all the time, over and over again, and I was just fascinated by it. Every year I would understand more and more of it. Then when I got here [to PSU], it had been a few years since I had read it, but my professors said this is a supplementary text to what we’re doing, and I was like ‘whoa, I already know that book.’ It was the same book.”
Jeffs recalls another story of her early interest in the weather, on a family trip to South Carolina from their home in Stoughton, Mass., when she was six. Her interest in lightning started out as a fear.
“It was lightning out, and one of my ‘loving siblings’ (my older brother) told me that lightning kills lots of people and would kill me if I stepped outside the car. And my older sister wasn’t doing much to make me disbelieve it. So needless to say I crouched down in the car and went below the seats. Then I started reading about lightning and realized I wasn’t as likely to die as they’d said.”
As a kid, Jeffs was happy to go outside and play softball if the weather was nice, but if it wasn’t, there was always the Weather Channel to watch.
“I was a freak about the Weather Channel,” she says. “If it was a rainy Saturday, my father would go crazy. It was his nightmare. I’d be at the big screen TV watching the Weather Channel all day, and it’d be the same thing every hour. He’s saying ‘what changed from last hour?’ And I’d be like ‘well, it’s moving across the country’.”
When it came time to choose a college, there were few criteria for Jeffs. She wanted a school “close to home and not overly populated,” and of course, primarily, a place with a meteorology program. Hello, Plymouth State.
Since getting adjusted to college academics was her first priority, Jeffs didn’t know if she was going to play softball until a week before tryouts her freshman year.
“I wasn’t sure if it was going to affect my schoolwork,” she said. “But I decided to try it. I managed both softball and school, and did very well my freshman year. I liked the girls a lot, liked the coach a lot, liked playing a lot.
It was lots of fun. I said to myself, I think I can handle this. By my sophomore year, I knew I could usually balance academics and softball pretty well. Hopefully, I’ll be able to play all four years. Now I have to work on the physical concerns, like blisters and cuts on my fingers from pitching.”
Studying meteorology is her priority at PSU, but it took some convincing for some people since she’s also committed to the softball team. “Most of my professors are supportive of my athletic career here. One of them gave me some trouble at the beginning, but he came around when he realized that instead of asking for extensions on work [because of softball], I asked ‘when is this due and can I turn it in two days beforehand?’”
The feeling is mutual from the meteorology department, according to the chair, Professor James Koermer.
“Kim is a really solid student, one of the better students in her class,” says Koermer. “She has a very time consuming and demanding major. Meteorology is much more than just looking at radar and maps. It’s basically applied math and physics. It requires many, many hours outside the classroom. Kim’s been able to balance the rigors of that program with the rigors of softball. She’s a very conscientious student, and she doesn’t use her athletics as an excuse. She’s always ready to take every test and quiz. When the softball team made the playoffs last year, the whole meteorology faculty was there to see her.”
Naturally, Jeffs is hoping her interest in meteorology will lead to something in the weather field after she graduates.
“I want to do something I enjoy, and I would love for it to be weather related,” says Jeffs. “Researching somewhere, doing anything with severe weather, tropical weather, hurricanes, storms. Maybe studying severe weather complexes or clusters and anything of that nature. My ideal job might be chasing tornadoes. That would be awesome!”
While Jeffs is willing to go “anywhere across the country or across the world” to study the weather, she’s happy right where she is.
“What interests me most about the weather is the fact that it can change and be so drastic, especially in New England. I think this is the greatest place to study weather. Where else do you know that it can be 80 or 90 degrees one day and then have snow the next day? That happened here a year or two ago. I think that’s awesome. I think it’s great that it’s always changing. Weather in general just fascinates me.”—KC
