The Bowling Green softball team walked away with a pair of wins yesterday, but it still wasn’t what they were looking for.
The Falcons beat Detroit by scores of 4-3 and 6-3, but for a team that has beaten one ranked opponent earlier this season and hung with national powerhouse Arizona, struggling against Detroit leaves the team well short of the level they expect to play at.
“I’ve seen us play at that level when we played Arizona or beat Northwestern,” BG head coach Leigh Ross-Shaw said. “That’s what we’ve talked about this season, is playing at a consistent level.”
The Falcons didn’t take long getting into trouble in the opening game.
An uncharacteristic error started the game for BG and Detroit struck twice in the first inning, taking a 2-0 lead after one at bat.
It appeared as if Detroit was the team that was favored on the day, as they maintained that lead through the top of the fifth inning.
But the Falcons woke their bats up in the bottom half of the inning as Allison Vallas drove in a pair of runs to tie the score up.
“The bats started slowly,” Ross-Shaw said. “It seemed like in our first game we weren’t being aggressive on good pitches.”
The two teams kept their gridlock at two until they both struck in the eighth inning.
It would take a run-scoring single from Jeanine Baca in the bottom of the ninth to bring home the 4-3 win for the Falcons.
The bats stayed alive for the Falcons for the second game as they banged out 15 hits in their 6-3 win to cap the day off. Vallas led the way in that game, collecting three hits while knocking in a pair of runs. Vallas was on fire on the day as she reached base on seven of her eight plate appearances.
More importantly for the Falcons, they got some good innings out of their pitchers that weren’t Liz Vrabel, the junior that has gotten decisions in 13 of the team’s 16 games.
Vrabel picked up the win in the first game in relief but it was Kristen Anderson and Emily Gouge who threw the majority of the innings for BG.
Anderson threw eight innings in the first game and allowed just three runs. And Gouge went the distance in the second game, allowing five hits and three runs to pick up her first collegiate win.
“Emily did a great job,” Ross-Shaw said. “She had a great fall for us.
“But with as tough a schedule as we’ve had it’s been hard for her to click.”
Up next for the Falcons will be a game against No. 1 Michigan at the BGSU Softball Field today at 4 p.m. For Ross-Shaw, she is just hoping her team plays their game and shows some consistency against an opponent they see on a yearly basis.
“Every year we bring them in or we go there,” she said. “I don’t really look at them as the number one team in the nation. I just look at them as Michigan.