Softball squad drops doubleheader to Utes
USU softball dropped both games of a road doubleheader to the Utes in Salt Lake City on Monday, 8-7, 8-3.
Utah came out strong in the first game of the doubleheader. Through three innings of play, Utah was up 6-0 and the road to victory was looking free and easy. Head coach Carissa Millsap-Kabala said momentum played a large role in the Utes’ early dominance in game one.
“Utah is a big momentum team in terms of creating energy for themselves,” she said. “You need that energy in order to make the other team feel inferior. Once the girls get over that stigma and have more confidence in their training and have confidence in themselves, they’ll start to see that they are a much better athletic group of girls that just needs to expect themselves to succeed. Once they start doing that, they’ll do really well.”
Going into the fourth inning the Utes were up 6-0. The Aggies stepped back in contention in the final four innings of the game, fighting their way back within striking distance.
USU scored three runs in the top of the fourth off of a three-run homer by third baseman Kelley Kaneshiro, but Utah countered with two more, which brought the score to 8-3. The Aggies continued to fight, and current WAC hitter of the week Tina Ferguson brought her stick. Ferguson hit a towering home run over the left field wall after Nicole Tindall walked to lead off the sixth inning, pulling USU two runs closer.
Opportunity knocked multiple times for the Aggies, but the door stayed unopened. In both the fifth and sixth innings, the Aggies had the bases loaded with go-ahead runs with the No. 5 hitter at the plate. In both cases, however, Aggie catcher Simone Hubbard hit a pop-fly to end the inning. Ferguson continued to fight, getting her second homer of the day in the top of the seventh and drawing USU to within one, but Utah held off USU and got the close 8-7 win.
Millsap-Kabala said sometimes things just don’t go the way the Aggies want.
“Quarter of an inch up,” she said of Hubbard’s pop-flies, “and you’re looking at a 9-7 or a 9-8 ball game or something like that. We’re swinging at the right pitches, and we’re doing what we need to do.”
Senior pitcher Kate Greenough had a fairly solid outing in game one. She pitched all six innings, allowed eight hits and four-earned runs, got seven strikeouts and walked only two batters. What hurt USU most was defensive errors. Millsap-Kabala said mental timing was an issue in these games
“I think the biggest thing that we can do to help ourselves is our mental timing,” Millsap-Kabala said. “We made some mistakes, in terms of our reaction time to the ball. That put us in a bad position to allow them to score some runs – more than they should have. If you take those two mental errors that we had away, you’re looking at a four- or five-run ball game, if that at all for Utah.”
In the second game of the doubleheader, Aggie pitching and defense struggled.
“Learning to be relaxed and do your job is key, and you learn that with maturity and as time goes by,” Millsap-Kabala said of her freshman pitcher’s game. “She gave up three home runs before she even got an out, but she learned a valuable lesson in that. Our other freshman pitcher came in and did a great job keeping it down, but we had some unfortunate errors in that situation, too. Our errors on defense didn’t help us out that much. Good solid defense will really win you games. Scoring runs is what will win you games, I know that, but good solid defense would knock that score in half.”
– la.hem@aggiemail.usu.edu