Unflinching: Rogers freshman Murray is TNT’s softball All-Area player of year
Sierra Murray barely heard the hecklers. A group of boys from Emerald Ridge High School were loudly counting before every pitch, letting Murray know if she was close to the 20 seconds allowed between pitches.
It was the 4A SPSL tournament league championship game in early May. Rogers coach Mike Hawkins wondered if the group of boys — who were heckling in good fun — might have been getting into Murray’s head.
“She wouldn’t even look,” Hawkins said. “She was focused.”
He asked her if it was bothering her.
“What?” she replied. “No, no, that doesn’t bother me.”
Hawkins’ concern was understandable. Murray is a 15-year-old freshman and was pitching in what was probably the biggest game of her life, to that point. That day, Rogers beat Emerald Ridge, 2-1. Murray pitched a complete seven-inning game, allowing one hit, one run, walking three and striking out 13.
All season, the Rogers freshman phenom was unflappable, unflinching on the hill. She led all South Sound pitchers in strikeouts with 252. She posted a 17-4 record with a 1.35 earned run average, walking 79 in 155.1 innings pitched. She carried Rogers all the way to the Class 4A state championship game, where the Rams fell to top-seeded Skyview, 3-1.
Murray is The News Tribune’s 2025 All-Area softball player of the year.
“I was just working hard, wanted to have fun,” she told The News Tribune before the team’s end-of-season banquet at the Heritage Recreation Center in Puyallup on Tuesday evening. “I gelled with my teammates really well, my catcher was really good.”
And she was poised beyond her years from the start. Even when Hawkins met her as an eighth grader, practicing at Heritage with her parents, he could tell she was further along than most high schoolers.
“She was just hitting balls off the tee,” Hawkins recalled. “I talked to her for a few minutes. Super confident kid.”
Once she came into the high school program, it didn’t take Hawkins long to see the buzz was justified. In a relief appearance early in the season in a non-league contest against Ballard, Murray dominated. The Ballard coach asked Hawkins after the game if Murray was a senior. He chuckled.
The most dominant outing of the season came in a 2-0 win over Bonney Lake on April 9. Murray pitched seven innings, giving up just three hits and ringing up 11 batters. Get used to those types of performances in the coming years from the rising star, who is already drawing Division I attention. She’s been pitching since she was seven years old.
“It was just competitive,” Murray said of what she liked about the position early on. “I like competitiveness.”
She throws a fastball, riseball and a deadly changeup, which is probably her best pitch at this point.
“It gets hitters off balance,” she said. “I’m comfortable throwing it and can make it look like a fastball.”
Hawkins said it’s a difficult pitch for hitters to identify.
“She throws hard enough that it makes a lot of people look pretty foolish,” he said. “There’s a little movement to it. It resembles the fastball coming out of her hand. That’s her goal.”
The state’s career strikeout record is 1,194, set by former Bonney Lake star and two-time TNT All-Area player of the year Brooke Nelson. Reaching that milestone would take good health and a little luck — and even then, might still be tough to reach. But for now, Murray is taking it one season at a time, focused on improving her already dominant arsenal of pitches.
“I want to keep going at hitters,” she said.
That’s bad news for the rest of the 4A SPSL and the state.
