Following a week of cancellations, the Bowling Green softball team will compete in Florida this weekend for the USF Under Armour Invitational.
Including games after the invitational, the team will face 11 different opponents over a span of 10 days.
“You never want to lose games [to cancellations]. Games are a great place to develop and figure out who you are as a team,” said head coach Shannon Salsburg. “The kids really worked hard though. We’ve had a chance to tweak a couple things offensively and defensively. We had a shift in our defense due to injury, so the break gave us an opportunity to continue to perfect those things. I actually think we’ll be more prepared this weekend than we might have been, had we played.”
In the teams opening tournament, freshman Katee Hinkle suffered a fracture to her hand and has been out since then. She will not play in Florida either.
Going into this tournament, 60 percent of the Falcon roster is represented by underclassmen. Despite that, the team has played well so far with a
4-4 record.
Important returnees for the team are senior Jamie Kertes and junior Braiden Dillow. Both players have already earned MAC Pitcher of the Week honors in just two weekends of play.
“Our chemistry in general has really meshed well and probably faster than most teams which I’ve been really pleased with,” Salsburg said. “The older kids have done a really great job of setting the standard, but there is an appreciation on both sides from the young and the old. It really shows where we are as a team with our chemistry and understanding what it’s going to take to win a championship.”
Going into this tournament, the mindset of the team is to test themselves mentally and to continue what they have done so far this season.
A completely different team this year, the Falcons believe that they contend for a MAC championship and have shown the weapons necessary early on.
In the first eight games of the season the Falcons have scored 22 first inning runs alone and 46 in total. Last year the team scored just 19 total runs in the first eight games and had only one win.
“It’s a whole different offense. We’re more mentally ready to hit,” Salsburg said. “If we have a runner at two, we expect to score her. That’s the mindset we have to have and we struggled to have that in the past.”
The team will start the tournament against Penn State on Friday and end with SIU-Edwardsville on Sunday. Following that, they will face Penn again on Tuesday for a non-tournament game.
