The baseball and softball teams’ season ticket holders were able to have the players sign the teams posters at the season ticket holders’ appreciation event.
Jonathan Rhodes/The Lion's Roar

For the second year, the baseball and softball season ticket holders had an event in their honor. On Thursday, Jan. 26, season ticket holders were able to attend an event in the Victory Club portion of Strawberry Stadium. They were able to have the baseball team and the senior softball players sign their respective posters at the event. 

Kasey Nielson, a pitcher of the softball team shared her appreciation for the patrons.

“I think this event is pretty awesome,” said Nielson. “Last year was the first year they did it, I believe, but there’s a lot more people than I really expected. It’s really awesome to see all these people here showing their support for not only softball but for baseball as well. I know even though we’re a Division I school, we’re not the bigger school, it shows that we have a good support system behind us from the community and we’re really excited about it.”

Softball third baseman Mychal Truxillo was also pleased at the turnout. 

“I think it’s a good opportunity that we can give back to our fans,” said Truxillo. “For them coming to see us play, it’s just to reward them basically and get an opportunity to meet all the players.”

Nielson also shared her views on the 13 new players the softball team will have this upcoming season. 

“We had a lot of new people come in this year, a lot of transfers, a lot of freshman, and it gets us really excited because it’s so many new people,” said Nielson. “But we’re all really meshing very quickly together. We have a lot of talent. We’re very deep when it comes to positions. We’re really excited to get it going.”

Director of Athletics Jay Artigues was pleased at the amount of patrons that came. 

“We were just talking about how we might outgrow this venue,” said Artigues. “We’ve been having this for a couple years now and it looks like we might outgrow the venue, which is a great problem to have. So, next year, we might have to change to somewhere else.”

Artigues expressed his joy with the new Head Softball Coach Rick Fremin and how the coach has helped the team. 

“Rick has come in and done a tremendous job with our program, changing the mentality, changing the attitude,” said Artigues. “Any time you have a new coach come in, it’s tough and it’s a challenge. And he’s done such a great job, putting such a tremendous staff together, recruiting quality ladies here.”

Fremin described the new players on the team, and how that would affect the season.

“The roster turned over a great deal,” said Fremin. “We had six seniors on last year’s team and then also seven are no longer with us. So 13 left the team, and 13 were brought in, seven JC transfers and six freshmen. Of those seven JC transfers, within the last year or two, they’ve either played for or won a national title at their previous school. So that group is really battle tested and has really helped us out this fall. It was a really smooth fall. This is a low maintenance group. I believe we’ve upgraded in just about every area.”

The new coach shared his experiences with the team and how he drew them together. 

“The main two issues we’ve wanted to really focus on was mental toughness and physical toughness,” said Fremin. “This group has really showed that throughout the fall, had a good fall season, finished 7-1 and didn’t give up too many runs against some good offensive teams.”

On the day of the event, a list of the best 50 hitters in the college level softball teams. Previously, the softball team had faced only a couple other teams that had hitters on the previous top 50 list. This season will provide more challenges due to more ranking hitters being on softball teams that the Lady Lions will face. He expressed his gratitude for the hardworking team and felt their hard work would soon pay off. 

“I’m really encouraged with our team at this point,” said Fremin. “We’re ahead of schedule with our training. We have to be, because the top 50 hitters nationally came out today. Last year we probably faced one or two. This year we will face eight. So, our schedule is definitely upgraded.” 

The baseball team was accredited with living up to their new mission statement.

“They did the work they needed to in the classroom, and the competition is still TBA,” said Head Baseball Coach Matt Riser. “We’re preaching all the time, talking about competition. We talk about community. We talk about classroom.”

Riser shared how he motivated his team to live up to the team’s mission statement of excelling in the competition, classroom and community. 

“I told our guys, if we get our team GPA, and we set a record for it, we can have springtime beards,” said Riser. “They worked extremely hard in the fall to get that 3.3 team GPA which is a new record for us in my 10 years of being here. We had 1475 hours of community service in the fall, which doubled our community service hours from last year. So, not only do they get it done in the classroom, but they got it done in the community and if there was a world series to win in the fall, we would definitely been dog-piling it in the fall.”

There will be new challenges in the upcoming season. 

“We’ve got 23 games against ranked opponents,” said Riser. “Last year we had four.”

Along with these challenges, there is a new turf for the baseball team to play on. 

“The new turf is in, it’s installed,” said Riser. “We’ve been on it since December.”

Softball seniors Mychal Truxillo and Kasey Nielson signed team posters on which they were featured at the season ticket holders’ appreciation   event for fans.
Jonathan Rhodes/The Lion's Roar