On the Khosravi plaque: The first Penn player and fourth Ivy player to earn Ivy League Player of the Year twice, she was a two-time first-team All-Ivy and second-team NFCA All-Region pick. A shortstop, graduated with Penn/Ivy League records for walks in a season and career, and graduated second on Penn's all-time lists in hits, runs, home runs and RBI as well as third in doubles and fourth in batting average. Her Penn-record .461 career on-base percentage was third all-time among Ivy players, and her .548 OBP in 2008 was second-best in Ivy history.
 
On the Kinsey Schu plaque: The 2007 Ivy League Player of the Year, she remains the only player in program history to be named first-team All-Ivy all four years. Second-team Easton All-American and ECAC All-Star in 2007, three-time NFCA All-Region pick. Still program's all-time leader in at-bats, hits, and runs and second in batting average, doubles, and home runs at the time of her induction. On Penn's single-season lists, she gets inducted still holding the top two marks in hits and runs, the records for at-bats and doubles, and is second in home runs.
 
In the middle of this millennium's first decade, a tremendous middle-infield duo was the driving force behind some impressive success on the diamond in Philadelphia, their combination of hitting prowess and fielding ability making them indispensable to their team.
 
No, we are not talking about Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley.
 
At the same time the Phillies' shortstop and second baseman were leading the franchise to the top of the baseball world, Christina Khosravi C'08 and Ann Kinsey Schu C'08 were busy turning the Penn softball team from Ivy League afterthought into a perennial threat.
 
To hear Penn softball coach Leslie King tell it, it was Rollins and Utley—two players in the conversation for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown—who had to do the measuring up.
 
"I think Annie is a way better hitter than Chase Utley ever was, and I think CK is a different kind of shortstop from J-Roll," King said. "She's quite a good power hitter."
 
But, she added, "the connection of the two, the relationship of the two, the way they worked together, I can totally see [the resemblance]."
 
Maybe King is a little biased toward her former players: Rollins and Utley were two of the best to ever wear the Phillies uniform, spending more than a decade as teammates, playing integral roles in the team's 2008 World Series championship and several other deep playoff runs.
 
Though Khosravi and Kinsey Schu only had four years together, their impact on the Quakers' softball program is also impressive. Which is why, in their first year of eligibility, the pair has been elected to the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame.
 
"It's an honor to be inducted in our first year of eligibility," Khosravi said. "It's probably not something we played for or really knew much about when we were at Penn, but having that honor and being recognized for the hard work and effort that we put in when we were there is definitely a reward."
 
"It means a lot. It means a lot, actually," Kinsey Schu echoed. "It just caps off my softball career."
 
There's really no other way it would have made sense than for the two of them to get honored simultaneously.
 
After all, the two classmates were the Quakers' starting middle-infield duo for four straight seasons: Kinsey Schu at second base, Khosravi at shortstop, out there on the diamond together for more than 1,000 innings, separated by no more than 75 or 80 feet the whole time. Their first two seasons, they even batted back-to-back—Kinsey Schu in the three-hole, Khosravi hitting cleanup—before Kinsey Schu moved up the order to hit leadoff as a junior and senior.
 
"I really pushed really hard for the two of them to go in together because they were the shortstop, second base, double-play duo, they batted 3 and 4, they were the same class, they were my first recruiting class," King said. "I couldn't separate them and have one go in one year and the other go in later, because I felt they were a pair and they were a dynamic duo and they needed to go in together."
 
But it's more than just their proximity on the diamond that keeps their stories intertwined.
 
Before Khosravi and Kinsey Schu arrived, the idea of the Quakers playing in the NCAA Softball Championship seemed like a pipe dream. By the time they left, it seemed like anything was possible.
 
~~~
 
Christina Khosravi was raised in the San Diego area, the middle of three children with two brothers who, like her, were involved in numerous sports from a young age. T-ball was an early love.
 
"My dad always joked that he wished I was a tennis player, so he'd take me out to the tennis courts and I'd swing and hit the tennis ball out—not just outside the court lines, but out of the fenced area," she said. "We quickly realized that team sports were more of a fit."
 
By the time she got to high school at Rancho Bernardo, Khosravi was playing basketball, volleyball and softball, though she had to drop volleyball to be able to confidently juggle two varsity sports on top of her studies.
 
"In the fall, during volleyball season, I would have softball or basketball PE and then go to volleyball practice, so sometimes I'd have practices for all three sports in the same day," she said. "At one point my parents said, 'You need to decide what you want to do, because school's more important and you're wearing yourself out.'"
 
While Khosravi was on her way to two-time all-league honors at Rancho Bernardo, Annie Kinsey Schu wasn't too far away at Louisville High School, an all-girls' Catholic school in Los Angeles.
 
Like her future teammate, Kinsey Schu played multiple sports growing up, enjoying her time on the soccer pitch, though she also got her start with T-ball.
 
"I remember going out my first weekend and striking out in every at-bat I had. I was like, 'Oh my god, I don't know if I could do this,'" she recalled. "But I kept playing, obviously."
 
Through her club softball team, Kinsey Schu realized what it would take to be a college-level softball player.
 
"That's when I really started to focus, and I knew it would help me get into a good school, which I wanted," she said.
 
Though both Khosravi and Kinsey Schu enjoyed strong high school careers in the softball hotbed of Southern California, their college interest was tepid at best after their junior seasons.

Enter Leslie King.
 
~~~
 
King came to Penn with an impressive resumé on the field: more than a dozen years as a starting shortstop for the New Zealand national softball team, including captain of the nation's Olympic squad at the Sydney Games in 2000. She also was an accomplished soccer player who represented her country at the inaugural FIFA Women's World Cup in 1991.
 
But when King took over the Penn softball program in July 2003, after previous stops in the same position at George Washington and Lock Haven (Pa.), she was taking over a team that hadn't had a winning season since 1984.
 
Even though she didn't have any deep Ivy League knowledge or experience yet, she hit the recruiting trail that summer knowing she needed to boost the talent level on the roster if she wanted to have a competitive team.
 
"I kind of gauge with, is this person going to make my team better? That is my first measuring stick," King said. "And then there's kind of a gamesmanship: Are they a gamer, do they have grit, do they battle? I like a scrappy, hard-working kid, so that would be the second thing that I look for. And obviously they [have to] have the SAT scores to match."
 
Kinsey Schu made her own fortune, reaching out to her future coach by email to let her know how she'd been faring against her competition.
 
"She would detail how she did, how she hit against certain pitchers—and we're talking pitchers that were going to Pac-12 schools, SEC schools," King said. "And I'm thinking, 'either this kid is a fabulous liar or she's a fabulous hitter.'
 
"And when I did get to see her finally swing a bat, I was like, 'okay, yeah, she can swing it.'"
 
By that November, Kinsey Schu was committed to Penn.
 
King found her way to Khosravi later in the recruiting cycle, getting a recommendation from a connection she had from Cal-Fullerton (where she went to college) to check out the cerebral, hard-hitting third-baseman at Rancho Bernardo. February of her senior year, Khosravi flew up to see Penn and was sold.
 
"I had never been in cold weather, I didn't own a jacket, I'd never seen snow," she said. "So flying out to Philadelphia was a whole new experience for me."
 
~~~
 
Though Khosravi and Kinsey Schu were both talented, high-academic softball players from Southern California, they didn't meet until they arrived at Penn for their freshman year.
 
But once they got to campus the connection happened quickly, spurred on by the softball players serving as ball girls at soccer games in the fall. Khosravi and Kinsey Schu discovered they both lived in the Quad, and they quickly became regular dinner companions.
 
They also discovered they had a similar work ethic, one that never seemed to stop.
 
"Annie would call me or text me and say, 'Hey, do you want to go hit batting practice?' or 'Do you want to go practice on the side?' and so we would go, just the two of us, [and] hit balls off the tee or practice off the hitting machine," Khosravi said. "I think there's that common desire to not only make ourselves better but also hope that the way we play on the field can help the team win games."
 
"Everyone [on the team] cared, but there's a different level of caring and being competitive," Kinsey Schu said. "And Christina definitely had that, a high level of competitive nature."
 
King knew she'd scored two talented players before they arrived on campus, part of a five-woman freshman class that joined a roster dominated by a sophomore group a dozen deep. It didn't take long for her to figure out how good they were.
 
Kinsey Schu was a starter from the get-go, and she opened her freshman season on a tear, with hits in her first six games. Khosravi came off the bench for two of the first three games, then got into the lineup for good, batting fourth. Kinsey Schu (.368) ended up leading the team in hitting while Khosravi (.301) finished third on the team in hits (31), a precursor of what was to come.
 
At one point early in the season, King pulled the pair aside after a practice.
 
"She said, 'You two are the future of the program,'" Khosravi recalled. "At the time I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about, but if you want us to be that, that's great.'"
 
Khosravi exploded as a sophomore, winning her first Ivy League Player of the Year honor after hitting .407 with 57 hits, five home runs and 26 RBIs. Kinsey, no slouch herself, hit .393 with 57 hits, five home runs and 25 RBIs.
 
In their first season, Penn went 14-25, a four-win improvement from the year before. Their sophomore year saw another four-win improvement, an 18-26 mark (5-9 Ivy League) that was the program's best record in two decades both in terms of win percentage and wins in a season.
 
That set the stage for a 2007 season in which the Quakers boasted 10 seniors and the two talented juniors, and the improvements continued. Penn went 23-19, including a 14-6 mark in Ivy League. Both of those marks were program records.
 
It wasn't until the final weekend of the year, however, that the Quakers knew they had really changed the program. In six games against Princeton over the previous three seasons, Penn hadn't won a game. They'd scored a grand total of two runs that entire time.
 
Over the span of that four-game series in 2007—the dates were April 21 and 22—Penn outscored its archrival 23-14, splitting each of the two doubleheaders. That was enough for the Red and Blue to win the Ivy League South Division title and advance to the Ivy League Championship Series for the first time, where they lost both games to Harvard.
 
After one of the games at Princeton, King was approached by one of the Tiger assistants.
 
"She said 'When did your team become rock stars?' and I go 'What do you mean?' and he she goes 'Your team, they're suddenly rock stars,'" King said. "When we started to beat Princeton, that's when we kind of all knew that the program was turning a corner."
 
Kinsey was named Ivy League Player of the Year after that season after she hit .450 with 10 home runs and 37 RBIs, all career bests. She'd moved from the three-hole into the leadoff spot—King intending to get her as many at-bats as possible—and it paid off.
 
As seniors, they helped Penn set yet another program record with 26 wins, though the Quakers didn't qualify for the Ivy championship this time around. For the second time in her career, Khosravi was Ivy League Player of the Year, hitting .390 with nine homers and 39 RBIs, her 42 walks giving her a .548 OBP. For the fourth time in her career, Kinsey Schu was first team All-Ivy, hitting .404 with eight homers and 25 RBIs.
 
"When I had to nominate people for awards at the end of the year and you could only nominate one player for the Player of the Year award, it was like 'uh, who can I nominate?'" King said. "I wish I could have nominated them as conjoined twins."

~~~
 
The arrival of Christina Khosravi and Annie Kinsey Schu undoubtedly marked the beginning of a different era of Penn softball.
 
Four years after Khosravi and Kinsey Schu last laced up their cleats for Penn, the Quakers set a program record by going 33-17 including a 15-5 mark in the Ivy League. The following year, in 2013, they broke through with their first Ivy League championship and their first trip to the NCAAs, hitting the 30-win mark for the second season in a row.
 
"I think it's awesome, what Coach has been able to do, and I think it's great that, because of that, we're able to recruit even better and more competitively within the Ivy League," Kinsey Schu said.
 
Several more recent players have taken some of their spots atop the Penn record books, but Kinsey Schu and Khosravi's names are still more than well-represented; Kinsey Schu has yet to be toppled from the program's at-bats, hits and runs scored lists, and she's second in batting average, while Khosravi is in the top 10 in seven different categories.
 
Professional careers have taken both Kinsey Schu and Khosravi back to their home state, though they've flipped cities: Kinsey Schu is now an attorney in San Diego, where she and her husband Aaron Schu are expecting their first child; Khosravi lives in Los Angeles, where she's Director of Business Analytics & Strategy for the Los Angeles Lakers.
 
They're still close friends, talking often. And while Kinsey said that softball doesn't necessarily come up, "it's the overarching thing for us, so it kind of underlies everything, even if we don't talk about it."
 
"I think back about how many hours we dedicated a week to softball and how that really sort of shaped most of our days, how we were there," Khosravi said. "It's hard to think, to swap that out, to think if we didn't have that, what would we be doing?"