Anna Campbell was entering her freshman year of sports at Pocatello when she first noticed something was off. She was ready to play sports, same as she is now, and she was getting an eye exam, the one everyone gets with the rows of letters that get smaller on the way down — and she realized she couldn’t make them out.

“I couldn’t even see the biggest one,” Campbell said.

That didn’t have to be the worst news. That’s why she was at the eye doctor, after all, to see if she needed contacts or glasses. Except soon after, she visited the eye doctor, where she learned something startling.

“They told me I was legally blind in my right eye,” Campbell said.

If that sounds like startling news, well, it’s a little complicated. Campbell could see out of her right eye — it wasn’t just black. Her vision in her right eye was just so bad that it qualified as blind. So doctors prescribed her a contact for that eye, that way she could level out her vision and keep playing volleyball and softball with full vision.

But, Campbell soon realized, it wasn’t exactly helping. On the volleyball court, when she hit the ball, it didn’t feel right. “It was just off,” she said. When she batted in softball, she felt the same way.

So by her sophomore year, Campbell ditched the contact entirely, going all natural — going legally blind — and leading us here, to this remarkable story. In the final week of April, Campbell’s Poky team is a spotless 17-0, and count Campbell among the biggest reasons why. She’s batting .395, with 17 hits (four for extra bases, including one home run). She also plays a reliable center field, which is extraordinary considering she only has vision in her left eye.

The interesting part is this: Campbell says the vision problem doesn’t affect her much at all in the outfield. She isn’t perfect, she admits — “but I think that’s more of just having a late start, not being focused,” she says.

Where it comes into play the most, she says, is at the plate. She’s a slap hitter, which means she bats from the left side, almost exiting the batter’s box as the pitch approaches, trying to slap the ball and get a head start down the line. She only does that because she can’t see the plate as well, can’t see the pitch as well.

Thing is, she wasn’t always that kind of hitter. She played softball when she was in sixth or seventh grade — then she quit until two years ago, her sophomore year. When she returned, she was trying to think up a way to combat her vision problem, when something occurred to her. She had slap-hit the last time she played softball, on her 12U team.

“And so I was like, you know what, there wasn’t a slapper on the team,” Campbell said. “And slappers tend to be quick. They want to get to the bases quick. They want to get around quick. So I was like, you know what, speed is one of my assets. I like to use it. I like to use it on the basis. So I said, you know what, if I’m starting brand new, I might as well be unique.”

That she is. Except for Campbell, it took work to adjust to. Just watch someone try it and you’re already halfway to understanding why: You’re already leaving the batter’s box by the time the pitch comes in, trying to hit it on a certain part of the bat, trying to push it the other way. So when she tried her hand at it, she had trouble reading outside pitches. She had to log lots of reps in the cages to get it down.

“Taking that extra time in the morning,” Campbell said, “and being able to read what is a ball, what is a strike?”

Now she has it almost down to a science. Turns out the freshman physicals are helpful sometimes.

“Anytime someone asks me a question, like, what’s something people don’t know about you?” Campbell said, “I always say that — and everyone’s floored, like, what? You’re legally blind. Like, it’s this crazy thing.”