As Shohei Ohtani was making his MLB debut in 2018, a different two-way player was beginning a historic stretch of play in Clarksville.

One thing it's important to understand about softball at the mid-major level—if you have one top-level arm at the head of your weekend rotation, you can be incredibly dangerous as a team just by winning a string of 1-0 and 2-1 games regardless of what your offense does. Likewise, if you just have one or two really incredible bats in the lineup, you can ruin an opponent's whole weekend with just a couple of well-timed swings.

And when you had Morgan Rackel, you had both that high-level arm and that dynamic bat wrapped up in one person. Having the same person ready, willing, and often able to solve any problem you might have on the field has to be liberating for a coach, and given that Rackel was on the field for the best two-season stretch in program history, it's hard to argue her arrival wasn't one of the driving catalysts for that success.

Morgan Rackel might only have spent two seasons in Clarksville, but her impact will reverberate for years to come. Some people might not call her "Austin Peay Ohtani," but that's only because some people are cowards.

Rackel was involved in 72 wins in her two seasons. The Govs had won a combined 73 games over the previous five seasons prior to her arrival. A lot of people deserve credit for the revival, and hopefully, more than a couple of them will make their way into the Athletics Hall of Fame and have their day in the sun at some point in the near future. The person who took the circle to start 52 games over those two seasons has to be near the front of the line.

A few fun facts from Rackel's career, both to encapsulate her impact and as a treat:

• She owns two of the five 20-win seasons in program history.
• In 38 seasons of Austin Peay softball, her 43 victories remains a top-five mark.
• She's the only Gov aside from Natasha Anderson to record at least 200 strikeouts every season of her career.
• The previous bullet point was a thinly-veiled inducement to urge the committee to reconsider Anderson, the ultimate ironman who still has 150 strikeouts more than any other player in program history and who can't be blamed for pitching all four of her seasons in an era where Austin Peay was mired in a 13-year stretch where the Govs couldn't hit better than .250 as a team.
• The mix and match of Rackel's offensive/pitching stats is fun. Quick, who is the only player in program history to land in the career top-10 in both ERA and slugging percentage?

Rackel's ability at the plate was often dwarfed by her talents in the circle, so let's celebrate what she could do at the dish first. A career .288 hitter, it's not so much that she had to carry the lineup—it's just that, since she slugged almost .500 and got on base at a .356 clip for her career, it's that she could if the situation called for it. Like her senior season against Belmont, when she hit the game-tying home run in the fifth and the go-ahead bomb in the sixth to secure a needed early-season sweep. Or the five go-ahead hits secured in her junior season. Or the smaller ways she contributed at the dish, like her command of the zone that was so acute she only struck out 10 more times (41) than she walked (31) in more than 350 plate appearances in her career.

She never beat herself at the plate. Quality at-bats, every time, in a lineup that never gave an opposing pitcher one second of respite. Just at the plate, Rackel had a great career—maybe not Hall of Fame-worthy by itself, but worthy of fond remembrances. But she also got to toe the slab as the starting pitcher for the Govs twice a weekend, and that's where her legacy was secured.

She was different—that much was clear from her first start against Georgia Southern when she fanned eight over six innings, the most punchouts by a Gov in a season opener since 2007. Later that season, she would end a significant streak in Austin Peay history when she no-hit Eastern Illinois for Austin Peay's first no-hitter since 1997, striking out 11 on just 89 pitches while keeping the Panthers out of the hit column.

That 89-pitch outing was light work for Rackel, a tireless workhorse known for her ability to throw 120 or more pitches with some regularity. The standard she set for inexhaustible efficacy in her junior season was the 127-pitch, complete-game, 12-strikeout effort against Tennessee Tech, but her opus was the single greatest pitching performance in Austin Peay history, set against McNeese State as a senior—16 innings, 16 strikeouts, a mind-boggling 217 pitches and, most importantly, the win. To put it slightly differently, McNeese State had two pitchers throw the equivalent of complete games, only to lose to Rackel, balling out of her mind and never even considering giving up the ball.

By the way, that 16-inning effort came six days after her second no-hitter, against Jackson State, one day after going the distance in a shutout of McNeese State in the series opener, and four days before she would (sing it if you know the words) throw seven innings to best Middle Tennessee on the road. Over about 10 days, Rackel started and won four games, threw 37.0 innings, struck out 38 and threw 541 pitches.

It might not be the most dominant stretch of pitching in Austin Peay softball history, but I don't know of many other players who threw five complete games in a four-game span.

When a player is a force of nature the way Morgan Rackel was for Austin Peay, two years is more than enough time to leave a legacy. Her's now includes induction into the Athletics Hall of Fame.