Jesse Talaugon: Time to DO WORK.

We started off this last Friday in Turlock in dominating fashion having Samantha Lipperd on the mound gave us the momentum to get the win, considering she threw her third career no-hitter. We were really happy with our aggressive mentality at the plate, we did not have a ton of hits, but we were attacking early, hitting the ball hard, and were confident that our balls would soon find gaps and end up dropping. This approach would be sure to help us find offensive success in the near future.

Game two of day one was an interesting one where we struggled early on with giving up free bases and crediting Stanislaus with a few clutch hits in the gap allowing them to score early. Down early for a few innings we finally busted out our bats and were actually even to gain the lead for an inning. Even though we were able to muster up seven runs, we were unable to get the win and were outscored by Cal State Stanislaus 12-7. In a game where 19 runners crossed the plate and seven of them were Seawolves, we were obviously disappointed with the loss, but happy with our fight and offensive performance at the end of the day.

Going into this series, we were looking to take four. I personally had predetermined this series as being one that was either going to boost our success onward and really solidify ourselves a spot in the top of the conference standings or we were going to have to fight our way up and rely on other teams to fail in order to make moves because we had dropped games. Losing one game on Friday still left us with the opportunity to win the series so long as we took both games on Saturday.

Saturday morning we were excited to see (Brittani) Weatherford again and were eager to face her a second time for we had charted her tendencies against each of us and had an even better idea of what we would see from her. Our eagerness didn’t exactly equate runs scored. We were able to get people on base, but struggled with getting them in as well as struggling with execution. Fortunately, with Brittanie Verissimo getting on base early with a single up with middle she set up senior, Kayla Ledford with a familiar situation, one where we needed her to come through clutch. In my personal opinion, Kayla Ledford is the most clutch offensive player in our lineup and has been for quite some time. If you asked me to choose someone to get the winning run in, during a pressure situation I would choose number 3, Kayla Ledford every single time. She thrives under pressure, has a tremendous amount of power, and has every reason to be extremely confident at each plate appearance. Sure enough she blasted a two-run bomb to give us the lead 2-1, and the eventual win.

Where we were once struggling with winning the first game of the day that was not the case this past weekend. In similar fashion to Friday’s performance, we dropped the second game of the day and the final out come of this series with Stanislaus was a split. From the coaches point of view they are hinting at the fact that offensively many of us are different players at practice then we are when it comes to games, implying that we need to take hacks just as big and just as confidently in the game as we do when we receive front toss of coach. Coach Mack gave us some food for thought and told us to “go out and play like we had never failed”; like we had never popped out, never struck out, never flubbed a ball, committed an error, etc.

Hopefully we can carry this mentality over into our series against Chico this weekend. Still I feel that we are seriously struggling with leaving runners on base and not stepping up and being the person that gets those runners in and instead our waiting for our “clutch” players to get the job done. In what I feel is our biggest series to date against Chico, we have a lot to prove to them and need to fill some voids in our game in order to find the success we deserve. Cross your fingers for weather that at least allows us to get these games in this weekend.

Jesse Talaugon: On A Mission.

Our series against CSU San Bernardino was a performance much closer to what we expect out of ourselves. Prior to playing, I had suggested that we have a meeting with the Captains/Council; which consists of the three captains and one council member from each of the remaining classes. We sat with Coach Bridges in left field and caught up on how we thought the team was doing and brought up whatever we felt needed to be addressed. My biggest concern was the as captains, we were conveying the same message to the team and that we didn’t have conflicting ideas to the team. I felt that at this rate we have had the opportunity to get our feet wet with this years team in our conference, but now is the time to expect more out of ourselves and that our performance was not good enough and we needed to put a little more pressure to perform even better. Everybody was on board with that idea and the next step was determining what was the best way to approach this idea and how we would get this message across without beating a dead horse and without seeming as if what we are doing is not good because it is, this team is just destined to be great.

The six of us made it our personal missions, to be the driving force behind changing the road that we were on and it was apparent that it sunk in with our team and our approach to this past series was much different from the series' earlier this season. We really wanted to change the theme of dropping the first game of the day and we were able to do that Friday afternoon. We really looked more aggressive at the plate, but our adjustments weren’t made quite as early as we would have liked, but coming out with two wins at the end of the day was a big accomplishment for us. Day two of the series was again about making the adjustment we had two games worth the day before to assess our competition and we were well aware of what we were going to face. Again, we came out swinging and were starting to string our hits along and we even scored early which is a bit of a rarity for our team. We were able to pull out a win the first game thanks to good at bats which loaded the bases and an insurance run thanks to a solo shot by sophomore third baseman, Brittanie Verissimo which sailed high over the left field fence.

Looking to sweep the Coyotes, we were let down dropping the final game of the series. Without a doubt the only thing that held us back from sweeping that series, was errors. Our defense is something that we as a team pride ourselves on and we know that it is a strong suit and we know how much we excel in that area of the game. We made some poor decisions, questioned our ability to make command decisions and carry them out, and simply were not anticipating the ball a play ahead. With that said, though Coach Mack gave us something to be proud of in stating that finally we showed up and played an exciting game, she felt that it was the best game we have played to date, aside from the errors of course. We are really looking forward to the next series in Turlock and hopefully solidify our spot in the top half of conference standings, but before that happens we will come out taking hacks in our doubleheader against the Academy of Art in San Francisco tomorrow (Wednesday at 3 p.m.).