NCAA, Softball, Sports

Close games not uncommon during first half of season

When the Boston University softball team routed Bryant University 13-3 on March 21, the decisiveness of the victory provided a much-needed sigh of relief for BU coach Shawn Rychcik and his Terriers. Before BU put on the record-breaking offensive performance against the Bulldogs, 22 of its previous 25 games were decided by three runs or less.

Bryant travelled to the Boston University Softball Field Wednesday for a second matchup with the Terriers, and the home team was certainly looking for another confidence boost after BU dropped a three-game series to conference opponent Stony Brook University last weekend, when it lost the first two games by one run.

Despite the fact that Bryant decided to start the same pitcher that BU last saw, junior Brittany Hart, the Terriers could not produce significantly on offense. The result of the game was another close decision, a 3-2 loss.

Since the passing of BU’s eight-game winning streak that stretched through the middle of March, the team has struggled to get back on track.

“We are a team of momentum, and, right now, it doesn’t take a whole lot to break our momentum,” Rychcik said.

Of the 22 games it has finished within three runs of its opponent this season, the Terriers have won 13, eight by a single run and five by two. Although the Terriers have a solid rate of success in such games, the lack of decisive wins likely has a significant influence on the team’s inability to maintain momentum.

Against Binghamton University two weeks ago, the Terriers managed to garner two of their three wins in the series by virtue of seventh-inning comebacks. Because the wins were heavily reliant on clutch batting late in the games, the offensive confidence of the team benefitted most, while pitching appeared to remain stagnant.

Junior Erin Schuppert started Wednesday’s game against Bryant, but when the Bulldogs negated BU’s two-run lead in the fifth inning, sophomore Holli Floetker came in for relief.

Rychcik noticed that the closeness of the matchup created hesitancy within his players and ultimately had adverse effects on their overall success.

“This game stayed close,” Rychcik said. “The thought of ‘This team with a not-so-good record right now has a chance to beat us’ just keeps rolling on you. Then all of a sudden they’re up a run in the sixth and seventh innings, and you start squeezing the at-bats, and it gets you out of where you’re supposed to be at. Ball players are supposed to be loose and free . . . and we couldn’t get out of it.”

A large portion of the Terriers’ successful close wins came earlier in the season. With this in mind, Rychcik plans to return to the drawing board and attempt to get his players to have a positive mindset again.

“We’re going to go back into the classroom a little bit with our team,” Rychcik said. “For the first five or six weeks of the year we met every week and went over our mental game, and we talked about our goals and how we were achieving things. We’re going to get back in there this week before we head up to Maine and just get people thinking in the right frame of mind and get out of some of the things we’ve been doing.”

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