Last year, Maple Grove’s senior staff ace Shanna Sticka led the otherwise-youthful Crimson to a fourth-place finish in the team’s second state tournament appearance.

To call Sticka’s 2010 season dominant would be putting it lightly.

This year, though, with Sticka gone and the pitching rubber moved from 40 to 43 feet from home plate, the still-young Crimson will look to prove that it should remain in the 2011 discussion with the state’s elite teams.

“I know that [the pitching staff has] definitely got a lot more mental toughness than they had last year, because this year they know they have to go in there and pitch,” junior third baseman Mandi Mauch said at practice last week. “Last year it was like, ‘Oh, well if I don’t have a good game, Shanna will just come in.’ This year, there is no ‘Shanna’s just going to come in,’ and they know that now.”

Juniors Cayli Sadler and Kylie Bratten will anchor the Crimson’s pitching staff.

Though Sticka carried most of the burden last year — she finished with a 0.52 ERA and 264 strikeouts on the season — Sadler and Bratten proved themselves capable of picking up the slack as sophomores.

Crimson coach Jim Koltes said he hasn’t decided for sure who his No. 1 starting pitcher will be this season, and that he would not necessarily be opposed to Sadler and Bratten splitting pitching responsibilities more or less equally.
The early part of the season, Koltes said, will serve as something of an audition period for his top hurlers.

“We know they pitch well,” Koltes said. “We just want to see their stamina and how long they can go. What happens after they come through the order one time? … We’ve been finding some good things out about that.”

Sticka’s shoes would be tough to fill under any circumstances, but Sadler and Bratten will face the additional task of adjusting to the longer distance between the pitching rubber and home plate.

Despite the obvious advantage for hitters, Sadler said the rule change is not necessarily a bad thing for pitchers.

“The advantage [for pitchers] is that breaking balls are going to move a lot more,” Sadler said. “There’s going to be a lot more balls in play, but they’re not going to be hit as hard because of the movement, and so we have to depend on our defense.”

Mauch said she and her teammates plan to disprove the notion that the Crimson cannot be successful without Sticka.

“We definitely relied on Shanna [last year],” said Mauch, who hit .342 with 21 RBI and two home runs in 2010, “but I think that this year we’ll be able to show more with our hitting … I think that we’ll be able to come out and just score those runs instead of having those one-run games.”

Despite returning seven of 10 starters from last year, this year’s Crimson squad features just one senior, first baseman Samantha Showalter.

Although she is the only senior, Showalter said she is far from the team’s only leader.

She said last year’s experience at state will pay dividends for the returning players this season, no matter what grade they’re in.

Showalter said that last year during the season, a state tournament berth for Maple Grove seemed like something of a pipe dream.

“But,” Showalter said, “I feel like this year, because we went last year we know that it is more of a reality and when we get there, that we’ll be able to just be more calm because we’ve been there before.”

Andrew Baker is a University of Minnesota student reporter on assignment for the Star Tribune.