Lady Buffs Softball

Last week the Lady Buffs played a pair of Double Headers against two 4A schools.  We are never shy about playing tough competition early and we know to compete we have to play our best.  It puts us behind the 8-ball sometimes because we start the season with a strong schedule but in the end we use the experience to our advantage.  This week on Tuesday, we play Concordia and had to go there without our starting Catcher Miranda Cottenmyre and baserunner Madison Waite.  Kelby Johnson saw her first game behind the plate and that is never an easy thing to do.  I was pleased with her for her first time and expect her to only get better with each outing.  In the circle, Kayla Sly and Joni Sheets are still improving and will get better as the year goes on.  We expect good things from them.  From the Plate Michelle Cottenmyre stepped up and lead the team going 2-3 on the night.  The games didn’t end as we would have liked but we did a lot of little things well- we just hurt ourselves with errors when we really needed to end an inning.

Chapman was played on Thursday and again we struggled finding the 3^rd out of innings allowing them to have big innings.  Joni Sheets came in to help out in game one and pitched the entire 2^nd game.  It was good she had the opportunity to see she could come in and throw as many pitches as she did.  Errors again really hurt us when we didn’t need them to.  With 2 outs Chapman score 12 runs in the first inning of game one to put a damper on things.  In game two a 5 run third inning with 2 outs is what started the down hill slide.  All in all we are improving and getting to a point where we feel if we can put things together you will see things happen on the good side for us.  Miranda Cottenmyre is playing through some injuries and helped us from the plate as she had all year.  She is batting 857 on the year and that is very good.

Over the last 4 games we have increased our batting average as a team over 20 points and if continue to do that good things will happen.  From the circle as a pitching staff we have cut walks down as well.  A walk is a run in most cases, so we need to continue the work we are doing from there.  We are excited about the games here on out as we get into schools our size and we will be able to see exactly where we are and where we need to go.