Confident Amari Harper carries necessary intensity into postseason

With a ridiculous .407 average this season, Amari Harper is a key component to Texas A&M's high-octane offense. Ahead of Friday's regional matchup with Saint Francis, the California native spoke to TexAgs Live about where her confidence comes from and much more.

Key notes from Amari Harper interview

• This season has been so much fun. This has been a dream of mine forever. Living out this has been insane. The intensity of it comes with it, so it’s good. We’ve prepared for the intensity of it, so at this point, it’s just going out and playing softball.
   
• Trisha Ford’s intensity is something we carry into our practices. We like to have fun, but when it’s time to get our reps in or watch film, there is a seriousness. At the end of the day, the games are the fun stuff. That’s when we just go out and play softball, perform and do what we have to do. Behind the scenes, it’s very serious. When we’re performing and doing what we love, it’s all fun.
   
• The Texas game in the SEC Tournament was a lot of us from the team last year having a “lick back” type of thing. Obviously, we took the loss very personally, and we’re trying to get back to where we were last year before we obviously move forward with that. We took that game as an opportunity to show them what we know how to do and a chance for us to perform, letting the results be the results. We just took everything in that game. We went all for it. We wanted to play our best softball, and we did. That was our best performance this year, and we didn’t care. We just kept going and were relentless offensively. It shows what we can do if we stick to the course and just do our thing.
   
• The 12th Man needed that win over Texas. As a team, we needed it. We know that seeing them again in the postseason at the Women’s College World Series wouldn’t need to be the same mindset, and it would be more of a fight. That specific game, we just needed to do everything and not stop. We had fun with it.
   
• In the SEC Tournament, I felt like I was in a little bit of a zone. I tried not to take myself so seriously and just go hit. When you think too much about it, you get in your head and have other things start to happen to you. For me, it was just see ball, hit ball. At the end of the season, that’s all you need to do. That helped me.
   
• We were all looking forward to playing Oklahoma, and we were all prepared. We knew that was the end goal of the SEC Tournament, so we had our sights set on that. It was a bummer not to play. We have a lot of softball ahead of us, and the coaches from both teams made the right decision because both teams want to be in the postseason for a long time. We want to fight for the national championship instead of the SEC championship. For us, it sucks a little bit because we wanted to see how it would go performance wise. We got the SEC championship split, which is good because it’s a first for us. You take what you can and just take the win. Once it gets to the postseason, we want to see what happens after not getting that opportunity.
   
• I’ve always been very quiet as a leader. I don’t say much, and if I do, it’s like, “Whoa.” I don’t say much very often. It has become more of a role on the field as a performer. It shows our freshmen and sophomores to just go out and play without worrying about the outside noise. Just go play the game. That’s where my leadership is right now.
   
• Little Amari would be freaking out. She would have no idea she would be an Aggie. I’m not from here, so Texas A&M was out of reach for me. Growing up, I would follow the popularized teams like UCLA or Oklahoma. Seeing me in an A&M jersey is awesome because it’s creating a new legacy that we want to move forward over the next couple of years, where the younger girls start to idolize us a little bit. It has been awesome, and I’m so excited. Hosting regionals and super regionals is such a dream.
   
• I picked A&M because I loved the culture. Softball is also not a livelihood for me long-term. It’s something for me to do while I’m getting my degree. Getting my Aggie Ring and the Aggie Network will help me long-term, and that drew me to A&M. This place has the traditions. The 12th Man is not something I saw growing up in California. We have UCLA and USC, but those fan bases are not like this one at all.
   
• The freshmen and sophomores have taken everything Ford put on the table for them and just run with it. KK Dement, Frankie Vrazel and Kelsey Mathis, and some of the other freshmen who don’t get as many opportunities, step into the role when it comes to them. They outperform everyone on the field. Mya Perez is outperforming everyone in the SEC. She’s just doing her job and what she loves. It has become easy for her to just perform to her mindset. Our underclassmen are learning at a young age what the next few years are going to look like, and that’s going to be awesome in the long term.
   
• We lean into the grittiness, and if you’re going to doubt us, that’s fine. Just don’t doubt us when we’re at the stage we told you we were going to be at, whether that’s winning regionals, super regionals or getting to the Women’s College World Series. If that’s our path, we’re going to stick to it and get there. If you’re going to doubt us, that’s fine. For us, let us worry about ourselves.
   
• Confidence is just the name of the game. Even if you aren’t confident, just fake it until you make it because nobody knows. Go out with that fakeness if you have to. For us, we just lean into the fact that we’ve been in these hard positions before, so we can get out of anything. We can work through anything as long as we’re all on the same page. It’s all about sticking to the routine and what we know, and that just becomes confidence.