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.).