The Lady Lions softball team return to their winning ways with three consecutive wins at home against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. The wins improved the Lady Lions overall record to 12-15 and their conference record to 3-3.
Head Coach Rick Fremin was pleased with the 2-1, 5-1, 4-3 victories on Friday, Mar. 17 and Saturday, Mar. 18.
“I can’t ask for anything else,” said Fremin. “Winning three conference games at home is our goal and that’s what we wanna do. I’m very pleased, and hopefully, we can build on this and keep the momentum going into the remainder of the season.”
Fremin believes that the team did well on most aspects of the game.
“I think any time you’re able to win a conference game, it’s a beautiful thing,” said Fremin. “We treat that very seriously, and I’m really proud of our girls. I’m proud of our pitching staff. I think that our girls did a great job fielding their position during the game. We had some timely hitting, and we’re able to put some short game and some base running together. I thought we played a fairly clean game, and it led to the sweep. So, I’m really proud of our team.”
In the third game junior outfielder Kalyn Watts hit her second home run of the season to help the team catch up from a 3-2 deficit. Watts tells how she felt about hitting the home run, and how she believes these wins will help the team going forward.
“I thought I felt pretty good, especially that was my changeup which was my weakness, and I felt like it boosted our team toward the end,” said Watts. “I felt like that boosted our confidence a little bit going into the next weekend.”
Watts also speaks about the team’s confidence going into these games and about how the team will approach their games in the future.
“I felt like we had nothing to lose,” said Watts. “Everybody played relaxed. We were there, I mean we had nothing to lose. We just need to win them all really. Have no fear. Just keep building off of this one and never back down.”
The Lady Lions had one win in 10 games before these home victories. Fremin believes that the team has learned from that experience.
“We’ve just turned a page,” said Fremin. “We’re trying to learn from those experiences we’ve had over the last month, and we knew we would be in a fight with a tough schedule. I just told them to learn from that because that’s gonna help us be a better team in conference play. So, they’re doing that. They’re understanding it.”
Fremin also said that the team is coming together in terms of experience and because players are returning from injuries.
“We got a lot of new faces and got a lot of new players, and I mean youth towards the understanding of how to play a Southland Conference opponent,” said Fremin. “We’ve played well at home throughout the season. The only thing that’s hurt us is that we haven’t been at full strength with all of our players in the lineup except for really the first weekend. So, outside of the first weekend, we’ve had players banged up. For this series, we got two more of them back. So, that helps us getting back to full strength to go and compete in the series and do a good job.”
The softball team hopes to go on a run after a good start to the second half of the season. They have games against Alcorn State and Nicholls coming up.
“Well, we gonna have a midweek game on the road against Alcorn,” said Fremin. “They’re a better team, and they swing it well. We’ll have to defend and push a few runs across. Then, we have a very intense game in Thibodaux. A conference game right down the road against Nicholls. Look forward to that too.”
Nikisun Shrestha/The Lion’s Roar
