When Jordan Fortel took the circle on Friday for the Lipscomb Bisons, it was the righty’s first pitching appearance for a Division I team since May 13th of 2016.
An all-conference freshman team member in 2016 as a member of the Chattanooga Mocs, Fortel earned the honor as a pitcher/offensive dual threat. She threw 122 innings for the Mocs in her sole season in Chattanooga, and hit .326 on the year with eight home runs. She earned her way into the top ten in the league in doubles and home runs.
After the season, deciding that Chattanooga was not for her, Fortel wound up at Walters State Community College in Morristown, Tennessee. “I decided basically to go back to square one and start over,” she said. At Walters State, Fortel again made a mark on her team’s offensive impact, hitting .561 for the Lady Senators with nineteen home runs and seventy-two RBI, striking out only three times during the course of the season.
“[How I got to Lipscomb] is pretty funny, actually,” Fortel said. “One of my best friends actually goes to school here, Hannah DeVault. We played travel ball together and I’ve known her since we were about thirteen or fourteen years old. I tweeted at Hannah to say happy birthday and that’s how [Lipscomb head coach Kristin Ryman] found out that I wasn’t at UT-Chattanooga anymore and that I was at Walters. I’ve known coach Ryman for years, but I had known [pitching coach Megan Rhodes Smith]for even longer. I came and fell in love with the program, with the campus, and with the atmosphere.”
Beginning her career as a Bison, Fortel expected her bat, not her pitching arm, to get the majority of the work during her time with LU. “We never explicitly talked about it, but what I understood was that I was mainly being recruited for my hitting,” she said. “And of course, I was fine with that – they already had some great pitching here at Lipscomb, so I figured I would just hit and play outfield and fill that role and if I got to pitch, then that was great, that would be awesome.”
After going hitless in her Bisons debut, Fortel took the circle for the second game of her team’s season. Facing defending SEC tournament champion Ole Miss, it seemed on paper to be quite the mismatch. Few expected an upset; even fewer predicted what happened when the two teams squared off.
Fortel froze the Rebel bats for seven innings, allowing just two base runners and those on a first-inning walk and a sixth-inning hit batsman. “I was completely oblivious, honestly [that I was throwing a no-hitter],” Fortel said. “I had no idea until we had packed up all of our stuff and were walking out of the dugout and our assistant coach looked at me and said ‘Jordan, that was a no-hitter’. And I was like, ‘there’s no way, surely somebody got a hit’. But we took a look at the book and no, there were no hits and I was just like ‘Whoa!’ That’s really when it clicked.
“I was honestly on cloud nine. It was such a good feeling to come in to the year so strong like that. I couldn’t have done it without my defense and how strong they were behind me. I was just really happy. To face such a good team like that and come out with that kind of result… that was not what I expected, but I was very thankful!”
Fortel was named the ASun conference’s Pitcher of the Week for her performance against the Rebels, and will look to build off of her impressive start when the Bisons travel to Madeira Beach, Florida this week for the EMU Madeira Beach Spring Invitational.
