We started off this last Friday in Turlock in dominating fashion having Samantha Lipperd on the mound gave us the momentum to get the win considering she threw her second career no hitter. We were really happy with our aggressive mentality at the plate, we did not have a ton of hits but we were attacking early, hitting the ball hard, and were confident that our balls would soon find gaps and end up dropping. This approach would be sure to help us find offensive success in the near future.
Game two of day one was an interesting one where we struggled early on with giving up free bases and crediting Stanislaus with a few clutch hits in the gap allowing them to score early. Down early for a few innings we finally busted out our bats and were actually even to gain the lead for an inning. Even though we were able to muster up 7 runs we were unable to get the win and were outscored by Cal State Stanislaus 12-7. In a game where 19 runners crossed the plate and 7 of them were Seawolves we were obviously disappointed with the loss but happy with our fight and offensive performance at the end of the day.
Going into this series we were looking to take four. I personally had predetermined this series as being one that was either going to boost our success onward and really solidify ourselves a spot in the top of the conference standings or we were going to have to fight our way up and rely on other teams to fail in order to make moves because we had dropped games. Losing one game on Friday still left us with the opportunity to win the series so long as we took both games on Saturday.
QSaturday morning we were excited to see Weatherford again and were eager to face her a second time for we had charted her tendencies against each of us and had an even better idea of what we would see from her. Our eagerness didn’t exactly equate runs scored. We were able to get people on base but struggled with getting them in as well as struggling with execution. Fortunately with Brittanie Verissimo getting on base early with a single up with middle she set up senior, Kayla Ledford with a familiar situation, one where we needed her to come through clutch. In my personal opinion Kayla Ledford is the most clutch offensive player in our lineup and has been for quite some time. If you asked me to choose someone to get the winning run in, during a pressure situation I would choose number 3, Kayla Ledford every single time. She thrives under pressure, has a tremendous amount of power, and has every reason to be extremely confident at each plate appearance. Sure enough she blasted a 2 run bomb to give us the lead 2-1, and the eventual win.
Where we were once struggling with winning the first game of the day that was not the case this past weekend. In similar fashion to Friday’s performance we dropped the second game of the day and the final out come of this series with Stanislaus was a split. From the coaches point of view they are hinting at the fact that offensively many of us are different players at practice then we are when it comes to games, implying that we need to take hacks just as big and just as confidently in the game as we do when we receive front toss of coach. Coach Mack gave us some food for thought and told us to “go out and play like we had never failed”; like we had never popped out, never struck out, never flubbed a ball, committed an error etc.
Hopefully we can carry this mentality over into our series against Chico this weekend. Still I feel that we are seriously struggling with leaving runners on base and not stepping up and being the person that gets those runners in and instead our waiting for our “clutch” players to get the job done. In what I feel is our biggest series to date against Chico we have a lot to prove to them and need to fill some voids in our game in order to find the success we deserve. Cross your fingers for weather that at least allows us to get these games in this weekend and till then we will prepare and take on Notre Dame de Namur tomorrow in a single game at home.
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