The team was for softball players 10 years old and younger, but it was still at Skowhegan Area High School. That’s when Skowhegan coach Lee Johnson first saw Anna Lorette swing a bat. Then Johnson called assistant coach Paul McCarty.
“After the tryouts were done, I immediately called up Coach McCarty and said, ‘You gotta see this kid hit,’ ” Johnson remembered. “At 10 years old, she’s one-hopping the fence at our field. He thought I was nuts — until he saw her. We knew then that she was going to be a pretty special hitter.
“I was drooling. I was like, ‘This kid’s got some serious pop, and I can’t wait to see how far she can go.’ ”
When Lorette was a freshman at Skowhegan, she hit over .380 for the Eastern A champions. As a sophomore, she became the first player to hit a home run over the fence since the double fence was installed. Two days later, she did it again. The distances are 220 feet to center field, and 200 down the lines.
Lorette was a senior this spring, and the word had fully spread about her power. She hit .465 with 18 walks, and four of her 20 hits were homers. Those walks boosted her on-base percentage to .623.
For her performance this season, Lorette has been named the Morning Sentinel Softball Player of the Year. Messalonskee pitcher Kassi Michaud and Skowhegan third baseman Shelby Obert were also considered.
Although she had enviable power, Lorette also took a bit of a scientist’s approach to the plate. Johnson raved about her ability to make adjustments when Lorette was a freshman, and he’s still raving about it.
“I think one of the things that people don’t recognize with Anna is she does such a great job of making adjustments during her at-bats,” Johnson said. “She might take one swing and look like she’s overmatched, but you will see her make the adjustment on her timing, and recognize what she needs to change.”
“If I find something isn’t working, I’ll change it,” Lorette said. “Slowly, one thing at a time, and adjust it until it works.”
That intelligence carries over to when Lorette is on defense. She became the full-time catcher this season, and one time purposely sandbagged her throws to second during warm-ups, hoping to trick the other team into thinking she had a weak arm.
“If you watch her, she’s always prepared, always knows the situation,” Johnson said. “I think some teams when they show up, they think, ‘We’re going to be able to run on this kid.’ And they quickly figure out that they’re not going to.”
While Lorette is a complete player, the defining feature of her game is her power. As such, descriptions of her home runs sometimes begin to sound like folk tales. One of her most memorable blasts came in her sophomore year, when she turned a 1-0 deficit against Erskine into a 3-1 lead by cranking the ball well over the center field fence.
“When Anna hit that ball against Erskine, everyone just turned and looked, and was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me’ — just could not believe how far the ball was hit,” Johnson said.
A lot of those 18 walks this season came from a fear of seeing a repeat of that kind of power. Lorette homered against Messalonskee the first time the teams met this season. The second time, the Eagles stayed away from her, and she got one swing in a nine-inning game.
Lorette has been deaf since birth, although with a device called a cochlear implant, she can hear and speak over the telephone. She said catching helped her because it enabled her to see the whole field, and her hearing wasn’t an issue unless the weather intervened.
“If it’s a windy game, Coach Johnson has to do some sort of hand signal, so I know what play it is,” she said. “When the wind starts moving, I can’t hear my teammates unless they make eye contact with me, and then I can read their lips.”
Next season, Lorette will be playing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a predominately male school in New York. Although she’ll be playing softball, her decision to go to RIT was mainly based on academics. She’ll be studying pre-veterinarian sciences and agricultural engineering.
“Once they see her hit, I think they’ll realize this kid’s a pretty special hitter,” Johnson said. “I have no doubt in my mind that Anna, if she chose to, could even play at a higher level.”

Matt DiFilippo — 861-9243
mdifilippo@centralmaine.com

Additional Photos

Photo by Jeff Pouland Skowhegan Area High School's Anna Lorette during a game against Mt. Ararat High School in 2010.

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