Bulbs flash at 'telepathic' triplets
By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

District III's Alexis, Taylor and Kelsey Oliphant at the World Series on Thursday. Photo by RUSLANA LAMBERT

“It was new at first,” Kelsey Oliphant said of the attention, “but it got kind of old.”

Kelsey is the catcher, Alexis is the centerfielder and Taylor the designated hitter. But the three girls, who sometimes talk in symmetry, are probably better recognized as numbers 20, 19 and 16 because of their physical likeness. And they are all integral parts of the Laurel team that has started out 3-0 in the 2007 tournament and all played, as freshman, on the Laurel High School softball team that advanced to the state tournament this year — alongside their older sister, Samantha. But despite all the extra attention, their mother, Tammy Oliphant, said they don’t see themselves as different.

“They don’t understand the triplet issue,” said Tammy Oliphant, a 24-year teacher married to a chicken farmer. “They don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”

Tammy, who said she will never forget the day she found out she was having triplets about six weeks into her pregnancy, called the girls “very close,” and said that having four daughters so close in age helped them mature as softball players.

“They’re very close,” Tammy Oliphant said. “But they have very different personalities. They’re kind of like each other’s sole mates.”

The girls, sometimes talking simultaneously after a Wednesday night game, agreed that having each other around helped them grow as softball players. “You always had someone to play catch with,” Taylor noted. The triplets also push each other athletically, constantly competing to see who throws the hardest or hits the farthest. They also had an inside look on the World Series before plunging into the event that attracts softball families from countries worldwide annually. Samantha, now 17, played in the series in Roxana two years ago. Inheriting experience from their sister and playing with her this year on the high school team was invaluable, they said, uniformly, Wednesday.

“It was nice,” Kelsey said, “to have a person to look up to.”

The experience, despite the extra attention that comes for the triplets on the world stage, seems to have helped. Alexis hit a homerun and scored two runs on Sunday to help lift Laurel past the eastern representative from Connecticut. In true competitive fashion during the next game, Kelsey doubled and scored the team’s only run in a 1-0 win over Latin America the next night. In a blowout win Wednesday, the triplets combined to score five of the team’s 14 runs. Jeff Evans, manager for the Laurel team who has been working with the girls for about 5 years and who received much of the credit for their continued improvement and love for the game Wednesday from Tammy Oliphant, talked about the girls Wednesday.

“They’re great and they’re having a great tournament,” Evans said before adding a fact about the girls noticeable only after five minutes of conversation. “They’re almost telepathic (with each other).”