The extra year of experience that we now have is really going to serve us well.
She's had some excellent outings, and she's had some not-so-good outings. Unfortunately, we have to put her in there, and she's getting more innings than I would have originally planned.
Olivia Mauro did a really nice job coming in as relief and containing them. That's the kind of performance we're looking for from our pitching staff.
From a pitching standpoint, we need to contain the other team. We need to keep the ball in the park and give our defense the chance to make some plays. If we can do that, then we'll be just fine.
Our infield got a lot of lead runners and a lot of outs at second and third. Instead of taking the easy out at first, we were taking the difficult chances and making them. That really, really made a difference.
Our hitting one through nine really came to the plate. We hit the ball very hard, and that's something that continues to be a strong point of the team.
We had a lot of good performances offensively. It was quite a challenging weekend for us, and I was just really thrilled that they put in that much effort and played as well as they did.
We don't have the scholarships, and kids can just walk in the office at any time and pack it in. It takes a special person to commit -- they have to have a love of the game and a high level of commitment to stick it out for four years.
The reason for the loss wasn't our inability to score. We're scoring a lot of runs, we're just giving up too many also.
We scored early. We scored first in both games and wanted to try and go strong out of the gate.
The morale is excellent and the confidence level is really high. The team is making great plays defensively, swinging the bat very well, they're playing this fearless type of ball and that's really great to see.
You can't make five errors. If you give a team that many chances, they're going to score runs on you.
It left a hole, there's no doubt about it, and it's a hole that we are not able to fill until next year. She was our top pitcher, and when you lose your best pitcher in your staff, that leaves a big gap.
Their pitching just wasn't able to contain our hitting and we just out-hit them. Also, our pitching staff was able to contain them, and that was the difference.
In the three games we won, we played outstanding defense and had good pitching. We have a very potent offense, and I've always said, if we can contain the other team, we're going to win games. That's basically what we were able to do in the three wins.
All in all we did some good things, but we didn't put it together. My goal is to learn from our mistakes and put it together by April for better league play.