What do you get when you lose the most accomplished player in program history, the backbone of the team’s first two NCAA Tournament runs in school history, the program’s first and only All-American, and the biggest offensive threat on an otherwise still-developing run-producing club?The Kentucky softball team is hoping the answer isn’t what you’d expect. Life without Molly Johnson begins Friday for the Kentucky softball team. The lifeblood of the program for the last four years, Johnson has traded in her glove for a diploma and a bat for a whistle.As an assistant coach on the team now, Johnson has exhausted her eligibility and the team must move on without her playing abilities. An expected drop in production would be the most logical thing to follow, but the Cats’ goals this year are actually quite ambitious – it’s to somehow take the next step without her.”We obviously need to get to Super Regionals,” head coach Rachel Lawson said. “I think we have been close both years, but we have fallen a little short. I think last year for us, we felt like we had the team that could go to Super Regionals. We just didn’t finish the deal.”Now they’ll try to finish it without Johnson and the much underrated Natalie Smith. “We are really good again in the circle,” Lawson said of UK’s two-headed pitching monster of Chanda Bell (36-21 career record with a 2.56 ERA) and Rachel Riley (18-17, 2.62 ERA). “I feel really confident in our pitching staff. We not only have Chanda and Rachel, but we also have a good complement of newer people. I just think we need a little bit more experience right now. We are improving daily and our outfield is very strong. I feel like defensively we will be in a very good position this year.”Where we have fallen short the last few years is offensively. We have had a strong top of the lineup, but all the way throughout the lineup we have been very inconsistent. I feel like we have more strength from top to bottom, and that’s going to help us. That has kind of been the thing that has kept us back.”The change in expectations for the program is still a very new feeling. Before 2009, the program had averaged less than 22 wins per season and had never sniffed the postseason.The last two years, thanks to the bat of Johnson and Smith and the infusion of aces Bell and Riley, the team made history by advancing to the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back years for the first time in school history winning more than 30 games in each season.It has been a momentous step forward for a program stuck in neutral during most of its existence, but postseason is no longer just the goal. The Cats have added another step.”If we put ourselves in a position to make the Super Regionals, then I think we have a really good chance of making the College World Series,” senior catcher Megan Yocke said. “It’s getting over that hump of Regionals that we haven’t been able to get over yet.”Meeting and surpassing those goals likely starts and stops with Yocke and who she’s catching behind the dish. With one of the league’s top duos in the circle and an offense that will be in search of a new identity, the success of the season could rest on the arms of Bell and Riley.”Pitching is going to be really important, especially early on,” Riley said. “I think we are going to have a lot of close games, so it is really going to come down to our pitching and our defense and getting outs.”It will come down to pitching and close games, if nothing else, because Johnson isn’t at the top of the order to pace the offense again. For a team that ranked second to last in the Southeastern Conference last year in RBI, saying goodbye to a career .389 hitter and the school’s all-time home run leader is a tough blow to absorb.Sophomore Kara Dill is Johnson’s heir apparent at shortstop, but it would be unfair and unrealistic to expect a second-year player who batted .246 with seven RBI a year ago to simply replace her. Instead, replacing the production of Johnson and Smith will be more of an effort-by-committee. Yocke, the emotional leader of the team, will likely assume the leadoff role occupied by Johnson and has seven game-winning walk-off hits in her career; junior infielder Brittany Cervantes (20 career home runs) is the bopper in the middle of the lineup and is starting to develop more consistency; and senior center fielder Meagan Aull (52 career stolen bases) is the speedy veteran capable of hitting anywhere in the lineup.The player who has made the biggest strides since last season and really increased her power, according to Lawson and Yocke, is senior infielder Samantha DeMartine.”I have really seen Sam DeMartine do awesome in practice,” Yocke said. “Whether it’s live or off a machine, she is always taking good hacks and she is always hitting it hard.”Lawson will also have the bonus of arguably the top recruiting class to ever sign with UK softball. In addition to heralded hurlers Lauren Cumbess (0.34 ERA as a junior) and Ellen Weaver (Adidas Futures top-100 recruit), Lawson brought in depth and diversity in this freshman class.”With our freshmen, I think we have had a huge surge in power,” Lawson said. “Emily Jolly is a gamer. She has done a great job and we need her. We feel good about the freshmen, and I think as we gain more experience, we should be pretty tough.”While Lawson admits she’ll never be able to physically replace Johnson, she doesn’t think the team is moving backwards without her. “We are certainly not going to have one person who does everything that Molly did for us,” Lawson said, “but we certainly have a lot of people who can all do what she could do at one moment. I think overall the team as a whole is better and it should be good.”Kentucky begins its season Friday at 4 p.m. in Miami in the FIU Combat Classic. The Cats’ first-round opponent is Ohio State, which knocked off UK in the last two NCAA Tournaments.It’s appropriate, in a way, that to get to the next step, UK will have to start against the team that has stood in its way and do it without Molly Johnson.