The UW-Eau Claire’s women’s softball team held a doubleheader against the No. 23 ranked UW-Whitewater Warhawks at Bollinger Fields this past Saturday afternoon. UW-Eau Claire lost both games but knows they can learn from their mistakes.
In the first game at 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, the Blugolds lost 1-11. In the second game, the Blugolds rallied back from a 2-1 deficit to take the game to extra innings. Unfortunately, the Warhawks scored three runs in the eighth inning to secure the series win.
“I think the first game we just had some mental errors,” said Jacie Schultz, third-year pitcher. “I think also in the second game, that brought us down. But we just have to push through that, and I feel like our offense also to get a little better with our pitch. We have to just focus on what we can do better instead of making it a big thing.”
Head coach Leslie Huntington reflected on the mistakes that she saw in her team throughout Saturday’s series.
“Our pitching in game one needed to be a little bit more efficient,” Huntington said. “We threw a lot of pitches for it to be a five-inning ball game. All day long our offense was just kinda disappointing. I felt like we pressed a lot. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We didn’t do the things we normally do. We didn’t have discipline at the plate that we normally have.”
If there is one thing the defense could be proud of from the doubleheader, it is that they showed how strong their defense was in game two.
“The defense I thought we played pretty well,” Huntington said. “Overall in game two, the defense played well. We pitched well, but we just didn’t get the key hits.”
The Blugolds know that they cannot dwell too much on today’s game, as they have a double-game series against the College of Saint Benedict (15-13) the following Sunday at Bollinger Fields.
“Our team is really big on mediation, in between games and right before our games,” Schultz said. “I think we’re all going [to] really take that to heart, and really settle back down. This game happened, and it’s over. We can go back and look back at it, but we can learn from it and take all that we learned and put it in this next game.”
Evbayekha can be reached at [email protected].
