When the Bowling Green softball team travels to Charlottesville, Va. this weekend they’ll be looking to win but, more importantly, they’ll be looking to improve.
The Falcons, last year’s Mid-American Conference champions, will look to improve on their 4-13 record this weekend before heading into MAC play.
Bowling Green was hoping to continue the success they had at the end of last season, but thus far has been unable to regain that magic.
“I think the thing that we struggled with at the beginning was that our expectations were pretty high,” BG head coach Leigh Ross-Shaw said.
BG started their season off at the Frost Classic in Chattanooga, Tenn. where they went 0-6.
“Going in we felt we could’ve been 6-0 in the tournament and still feel that we should’ve been,” Ross-Shaw said. “At the time, we wondered if we are as good as we think we are.”
Since then, the Falcons have went 4-7, but those games have been against some of the toughest competition in the nation. At the UNLV Rebel Tournament last week the Falcons played UNLV, North Carolina State, New Mexico State and No. 1 Arizona.
The Falcons finally started playing their kind of softball in Las Vegas. In the Arizona game, BG’s Liz Vrabel went head-to-head with Arizona’s freshman sensation Taryne Mowatt and kept the Falcons in the game throughout before losing 3-0.
“I could already see when we played Arizona and it was a game that felt like the MAC tournament [we were improving],” Ross-Shaw said. “The last two or three games we’ve really started to play well.”
Of those last three games, Lindsay Heimrich has taken the mound with fury. In her last two starts she has thrown 14 innings while giving up just one run and picking up a pair of wins.
The Falcons will need to continue this success if they want to be anywhere near their goal of being .500 going into MAC play. The Falcons expected their road to be rough, but this is their toughest pre-MAC schedule they’ve had, according to Ross Shaw.
The Falcons will start play today at the Hoo’s Who Tournament when they take on Toledo at 11 a.m.
