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Morgan City High School's Kennedy Hebert will conclude her stellar prep career this weekend with her teammates at the Allstate Sugar Bowl/Louisiana High School Athletic Association Softball State Tournament at Frasch Park in Sulphur. In the top photo, she pitches in last year's quarterfinal contest against West Ouachita, while above, she bats during her early days with softball as a member of one of the Morgan City Recreation Department's all-star teams. (Submitted Photos/Courtesy of Kennedy Hebert)

MCHS' Hebert to conclude stellar prep career this weekend

Morgan City High School’s Kennedy Hebert has made it look so easy on the softball field.
Too many no-hitters and one-hitters to remember and double-digit strikeout performances all wrapped — along with a lethal curveball — into a career record of 63-15 that includes nearly 700 career strikeouts.
And that’s just on the mound.
At the plate, the career numbers may be more daunting. A .500-plus batting average, 20 home runs and more than 160 RBIs.
It’s a body of work in which the Nicholls State signee certainly will be remembered after she and her Lady Tiger teammates conclude their season at the Allstate Sugar Bowl Louisiana High School Athletic Association Softball State Tournament this weekend. Morgan City, Class 4A’s No. 1 seed, is looking to bring home a state title.
But while the stats may be the story of her career publicly, what she has done behind the scenes to get here — all in preparation for a Division 1 future that awaits her next year — is much less glamourous but vitally important.
It’s a story of a teenager and her father who have put in countless hours perfecting her swing, whether it be through intensive film study, working in the cages or the use of a scarred tee in the family’s game room at their Morgan City home.
“She just really has more of a desire and a passion for the game,” said Morgan City Coach Tamara Keller, who hails from Texas and played college softball at Texas State. “Her work ethic far surpasses anybody I’ve ever coached.”
Following big sister’s crew
The story of Kennedy Hebert’s softball career actually began by watching, practicing with and following her older sister Tyler’s team when both were youngsters.
“My dad always coached her, so I was just watching them at practice, and I always practiced with them, even before I was even ready to play,” said Kennedy, who is three years younger than Tyler.
Kennedy got her start playing softball before most, too, as at age 6, her parents, Joe and Kitty, successfully petitioned the Morgan City Recreation Department to allow her to play on Tyler’s 7 –and-8-year-old softball team.
“She had been practicing with them, and she was always out there with them all of the time, so she was far enough along that she was able to keep up with the older kids at a really young age,” Joe said.
Joe said he recognized early that he had something special on his hands with Kennedy.
Love-hate relationship with pitching?
Growing up, and still to this day, Kennedy has not had a chance to play many other positions than pitcher because she was the only pitcher her teams had.
“She almost grew to resent it, because she had to work so hard, and she was the only pitcher we had, so she never really got the opportunity to go play other positions,” Joe said.
Kennedy said that she is best at pitching than any other position because she has spent so much time doing it. But she said she doesn’t know if she would say she dislikes it.
“Along the way, I think now that she’s realized how special her talent is at pitching, I think she’s come to understand, ‘hey, if I’m going to be really, really good, I’m going to be really, really good there,” so I think she’s grown to love it,” Joe said.
Kennedy got a break from the mound her freshman season as Tyler was concluding her standout career as a Lady Tiger on the mound.
During that time, Kennedy played shortstop and some first base but primarily second base.
She did pitch the second game of a doubleheader against Baton Rouge-based St. Joseph’s Academy, a Class 5A school, where she struck out senior and future LSU softball player Elyse Thornhill.
“Looking back at it now, I wish they would have made me (pitch), because we could have been so much better with me and Tyler in a rotation,” Kennedy said.
The curveball
When the Class of 2015 — which included Tyler — graduated, the Morgan City Lady Tiger softball team lost several Division I college softball players.
The team entered the 2016 season with plenty of holes that freshman and sophomore filled. Kennedy, a sophomore, took over on the mound.
Entering her new role as a sophomore and beyond, Kennedy figured the Lady Tigers would be in a rebuilding mode and never be as good as they were her freshman year when the team advanced to the Class 4A regional round because of the quality of players that they lost with that senior class.
In preparation for that season, Kennedy and her dad worked a lot on the mound, including on her curveball. It was a pitch that Joe said he didn’t know how good it could be until it was used during the season.
“When that pitch is good, she’s really good, and she’s just so tough to hit after that,” Joe said. “It’s just that curveball just she makes everybody look (bad), and then you put that combination of that changeup in there, it just really keeps people off balanced all the time.”
Berwick High School coach Heather Templet, who has led her team against Kennedy and the Lady Tigers the past three seasons, knows first-hand about the curveball and Kennedy’s talent.
“She’s one of the best pitchers in the state,” Templet said. “Her curveball, her off-speed is amazing, and then she can just blow it by you, so that’s real difficult, especially when the girls haven’t faced that all year. That’s the reason that we do play her, to get that experience against somebody that is good like that.”
So what is it that makes her four-seam curveball so effective?
It “actually bends,” Kennedy said.
“It’s not an angle pitch,” she said. “It’s actually moving out there.”
Tyler: “It’s just ridiculous. There aren’t many people who can spin the ball as fast as she spins the ball, and that thing breaks like a couple feet when it’s on, so those girls aren’t used to being exposed to stuff like that.”
Keller called Kennedy’s curve ball “one of the best she has ever seen at any level.”
Or, as Tyler said, “It just makes a lot of people look ridiculous, to be honest. It’s funny, really, but when it’s on, it’s just almost unhittable.”
A tireless work ethic
Kennedy and Joe, along with a co-worker of Joe, spent countless hours, through video analysis, working on changing Kennedy’s swing to mimic a baseball player’s swing. The process has included a frame-by-frame analysis of Kennedy’s swing against what they were looking for.
“You can put a true college softball player and a major league baseball player (next to each other, and) the really, really good one’s, you can’t hardly tell the difference” with their hand paths, Joe said.
That transformation has involved altering her mechanics, a process that has lasted three years.
“You’re just seeing the outcome of it over the last three weeks really,” Joe said Sunday. “The last three weeks, the video of what we were looking for, and the video of where her swing’s at are in line now. … I didn’t think it would take that long to change the bad mechanics, but it did. It took that long to get her swing to where we were looking for a Division 1 swing, not a high school swing, and I really believed we’ve gotten there now.”
The road, of course, has included lots of reps.
“A lot of swings in the cage, a lot of swings in the game room. A lot of swings everywhere,” Kitty laughed.
During the offseason, Kennedy will take swings about 2-3 times a week and five times a week during the season.
“When everybody else just sees the lights come on, they don’t see what she’s doing in the dark. … I just tell them all the time, it’s really, really easy to be average,” Joe said. “It takes a lot of lot of work to be great, and that’s really what we’ve set out to do with her as far as softball,”
This season Hebert is batting .614 with 16 doubles, six triples, six home runs and 57 RBIs. She has walked 17 times and struck out just five times.
Not to be outdone, she is 23-4 on the mound with a 1.42 ERA. She has walked 75 batters and struck out 232.
With her equally impressive talent on the mound and at the plate, how does one define Kenney Hebert: a pitcher that can hit or a hitter that can pitch?
“A hitter that can pitch, for sure,” she laughed. “Give me a bat.”

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