Ask senior Casey Stangel what she'll remember most about her time at Lake City High, and the answer from the Timberwolves' softball star has nothing to do with all the victories and all the strikeouts and trying to win another state title.

"I love our bus rides," she said. "Our bus rides are just awesome. On the way there, I sit with (teammate) Vanessa Shippy every single time. Because I'm super superstitious. I always have my headphones in, and I listen to those (inspirational) TCU videos before every game.

"I always have to be the first one off the bus. And on the way back, I always sit with Dan (Silvas), the pitching coach, and we talk about the game ... the highlight of it all is the cool superstitions we have."

That includes changing into her uniform in the same women's restroom - not the locker room - and in the same stall (we didn't ask which stall).

"I put on Vanessa's eyeblack and she puts on mine, and I put on Lindsey's (Willmon, her teammate) ... team things that I'm really going to miss next year."

Stangel's high school career comes to a close this weekend, when Lake City plays at the state 5A softball tournament Friday and Saturday at Ramsey Park in Coeur d'Alene. With Stangel in the circle, Lake City made it to state each of her first three years, winning an undefeated state title in 2011, and finishing second last year.

She is 24-0 this season with an 0.78 ERA, with 180 strikeouts and 26 walks in 117 innings for Lake City (24-0).

For her T-Wolf career, she is 88-9, with 904 strikeouts in 554 1/3 innings.

JUST BEFORE Stangel's freshman season, Lake City coach Laura Tolzmann said she could be "the best I've ever seen come through here."

Three years later?

"I think she's been everything and more," Tolzmann said recently. "I couldn't have asked for a better kid to come through our program and help get it to where it's at.

"She's left her mark, and it's been an awesome example for underclassmen to have similar goals and to keep the tradition going. Not only work ethic-wise, but attitude-wise, hustle-wise ... always wanting to be better every day. She's instilled that mentality in the underclassmen."

Shippy, a junior, is Stangel's friend, sometimes her catcher, sometimes joins her for late-night hitting and pitching sessions in the Lake City indoor facility, sometimes her movie partner, sometimes her singing partner (more on that one later).

"Everything she does is magnified," Shippy said. "It's good, but they expect her to be perfect, but no one is."

She's been pretty close to it at Lake City, standing 43 feet away from the plate, staring in at the batter, eyeblack streaking down her cheeks, with a fastball in the upper 60s on the way.

"When she steps on the field a lot of people seem scared of her, but she is one of the greatest people you'll ever meet in your life - fun, respectful, not mixed up with the wrong crowd," Shippy said. "She's not as scary off the field as she is on the field. I could tell how it could be intimidating, but she's not like that."

There's no magic formula to her success, says her dad, Chris Stangel. It's a pretty simple combination of work ethic and consistency.

"Three years ago Casey had her appendix blow up, and two days later she was on a bus and pitching at state," he recalled. "Casey's work ethic is the best I've ever known of an athlete, but work ethic isn't what impresses me about Casey, it's consistency.

"She goes out every night and competes every night. If she's sick, she competes. If she's out of the hospital, she competes. If she's sore, she competes. You wouldn't know the difference one way or the other. She loves the game, she loves to compete."

CASEY STANGEL played other sports growing up - her mom, Debi, played soccer at UCLA, and Casey also played that sport - but softball was always her first love.

When her family lived in Danville, Calif., her dad, the former baseball coach, had a hitting facility, and he remembers Casey, in diapers, grabbing a bat.

"I always made sure she swung from the left side," said her righty-hitting dad, who made it as far as class AA with the San Francisco Giants, and was told if only he hit from the left side ...

"She's going to be a player, I can tell," he recalled.

She became a pitcher at age 8.

"I remember playing first base, and the girl that was pitching on my team was just not getting it done and I remember going up to my coach and going, 'I want to pitch. He was like, OK.' ... My dad was like, 'You don't want to be a pitcher,' and I was like, 'No, I'm going to be,'" Casey said.

So she started taking pitching lessons.

"You need to be a hitter and a first baseman," she recalled her dad telling her.

"No, I want to pitch," she replied. "You just didn't want to sit on the bucket and catch."

MOST PEOPLE consider Casey Stangel a pitcher who also hits.

She considers herself a hitter who pitches.

"I hate being called a pitcher," said Casey, who sings right before she delivers her pitch because it keeps her from thinking too much. "People always say pitchers are such princesses. And I say no, I am not a princess, I am not a pitcher, I am a hitter."

Considering the lefty-swinging Stangel is a career .559 hitter at Lake City, with 40 homers and 202 RBIs, she can be called whatever she wants to be called.

She was recruited to Missouri as a pitcher and a hitter - the Tigers plan to play her in right field when she's not pitching.

Prior to this season, under the tutelage of Missouri pitching coach Doug Gillis, they worked on fine-tuning her pitches and changing her pitching mechanics - essentially, making sure her body is in the same position for each pitch, so as not to tip off which pitch is coming.

As she adjusted to her new mechanics early this season, she gave up a few more hits than normal, and struck out a few less. In recent weeks, the hits have gone down, the strikeouts up.

Growing up in northern California, Stangel always planned to go to nearby Cal. Then, the summer before her sophomore year at Lake City, she was playing in a tournament in Colorado with her club team from California when the phone rang after the game. Her dad handed her the phone - it was Missouri softball coach Ehren Earlywine.

She knew nothing about Missouri softball at the time. But after a few minutes on the phone with Earlywine, she hung up the phone.

"I told my dad I have no idea who that is, but that's where I want to go to college," she said.

"I just liked the things coach Earlywine talked about," she said. "I liked that he talked about all the things that he wanted to do with the program, whereas, (when you talked to other coaches), they would say, in the past, we won this, this and this. and that was great ... But I loved that coach Earlywine was talking about the future - here's what I'm building in my program. He completely turned around Missouri. They were terrible before he got there. It was really coach Earlywine who made me want to go to Missouri."

Stangel, who had recruiting interest from most of the Pac-12 schools, and received her first recruiting letter in the sixth grade - from Notre Dame - verbally committed to Missouri in September of her sophomore year, and signed with the Tigers last fall.

WHEN CASEY fills out questionnaires in class, she is often asked for her hobby.

She replies ... softball.

"Softball is my life, and I'm totally OK with it," she says.

Because it's her choice.

"I just really want to be the best I can at everything I do. 40 minutes to spare, let's get in a run," she said. "I think the people who get burned out are the people who have people telling them to do it all the time. I'll never get burned out because I do it because I truly love every part of softball. If I didn't want to be doing anything, I wouldn't be doing it. I've always had the support of my parents, but they never have told me to do it."

Her dad says Casey's success is 100 percent because of her.

"Casey's Casey because she wants it, and she sacrifices her tail off to get it," Chris Stangel said.

Chris, the longtime baseball guy, said he "just knew" that when Casey came along, she was going to be named after Casey Stengel, the former major league baseball player and manager who was born in 1890, and lived to be 85.

(Emmitt Stangel, Casey's older brother by three years, was named after Emmitt Smith, the longtime Dallas Cowboy great).

"In middle school I Googled my name one day and this old guy popped up and I was like, 'Who's that?'" Casey recalled. "My dad said, 'Yeah, that's who you were named after.'"

Casey said she enjoyed blogging for ESPN.com's high school page during her junior year, sharing her thoughts and experiences on ... well, everything. For years she has wanted to be a broadcaster for ESPN, once her playing days are done.

Then again ...

"Vanessa and I talk about coaching a college softball team and winning a few national championships," Casey says. "We'll bring Lindsey on, too."

Stangel by the numbers

Pitching

Year IP W-L ERA ER K BB

2010 156 17-7 1.12 25 236 48

2011 149 25-0 0.33 7 283 31

2012 132.1 22-2 0.37 7 205 23

2013 117 24-0 0.78 13 180 26

Totals 554 88-9 0.66 52 904 128

Batting

Year Avg. HR RBI

2010 .404 (36-89) 4 29

2011 .605 (49-81) 11 52

2012 .558 (43-77) 11 59

2013 .688 (53-77) 14 62

Totals .559 (181-324) 40 202