In the four-game series against Texas A&M-Kingsville, the softball team ended it with a sweep to expand their winning streak to nine games. After a slow start to the season, the team has been on a roll during Lone Star Conference play with a record of 11-1.
Brady Tigert, head softball coach, said, “We’ve been working hard lately and we needed to turn our season around because we weren’t playing well early in the season. We really focused in our practices that we were working hard and it’s changed our luck. It’s changed our habits and what we are doing out on the field.”
Pitching was an issue at the beginning of the season and with experience the defense has improved.
Tigert said, “We just weren’t in shape, we weren’t mentally ready. They are young and they’ve matured very quickly. Our pitchers are starting to figure things out.”
The biggest asset to the team is it’s offense.
Katy Vandewater, junior in nursing, said, “Hitting is our biggest strength I would think. We have our problems here and there but when one comes up we always have something good going on the other side of the ball.”
In the series against Kingsville, the team started out slowly Saturday winning 1-0 in the first game. In the second game the offense started producing winning that game 8-4.
Tigert said, “We’re a very good hitting team when we want to be and honestly I don’t think that we hit as well as we could have. I thought Kingsville’s pitchers did a heck of a job keeping us off-balance with off speed pitches and kept us reaching, extending way to far outside of the zone. It made us pop-up, we had some weak hits and we finally made the adjustments.”
On Sunday the team finished the series winning 10-1 in the first game and 16-5 in the final.
Katy Vandewater, junior in nursing, said, “We’ve been doing real good coming together and playing as a team.”
Going into the next four-game series this weekend the team plays Angelo State University in San Angelo. The team lost the series to Angelo State last year 1-2 at home.