2018 SEC Softball Tournament: Day Three Recap
Winning the SEC league championship is a grind, twenty-four tough games over nine weeks. A slump, even a relatively short one, can cost you. Winning the SEC tournament can happen if you play your best on this one weekend. Sometimes teams do both, playing well all year and elevating their game in the tourney.
The first game of the semi-finals matched South Carolina and Arkansas. Both teams, if you had asked them back in February if they would be happy finishing in the upper half of the conference and getting this far in the tourney, would have said yes, but now only one would be moving on to the finals.
Cayla Drotar, on the original line-up card to start in the circle, was a last-minute scratch. Dixie Raley had to step in, warm up quickly, and psychologically adjust to being handed the game ball. Last year she was pitching for Georgia Southern in the Sun Belt conference, where she made second-team all-league and had a 3.41 ERA. Moving up to the SEC this year, she raised her game, going 11-4 with a 2.18 ERA against tougher competition.
South Carolina scored first, on a two-out infield single by Kenzi Maguire that she beat out by a whisker. Head Coach Beverly Smith says that all season different players have stepped up, something demonstrated in the fourth inning. After a lead-off single by Jana Johns, eight-hole hitter Tiara Duffy hit a two-run homer. Arkansas had base-runners, as they got two walks and five hits, but only in the sixth inning could they push a run across. They fell to South Carolina 3-1.
Raley was superb, going the distance. After the game, she said that it was a great team win, with the offense producing runs and the defense having her back. In typical modest fashion for women’s softball, Raley didn’t mention her own excellent pitching. “We’re really excited about getting this far,” she said. “This is what we’ve been working for all season. We feel like we should be in this position.” She also said, about her transferring to South Carolina, that this game made her dreams become a reality.
In game two, Matty Moss got the start in the circle for Tennessee against Florida. Moss has been a big-time pitcher for Tennessee these past three years, particularly in 2017 when she went 26-3. But Florida did, in the first inning, what it is so good at: Amanda Lorenz walked, and then Nicole DeWitt hit a two-run bomb. Florida scores a lot of runs on few hits, in part because Head Coach Tim Walton emphasizes plate discipline and working the count. Not only do the Gators’ batters draw walks, but they get hit by pitch frequently. And when they hit, they’re often going for extra bases. Their on-base + slugging percentage is really high, and that translates into a lot of runs scored. In batting average they are ranked No. 56 nationally; in runs scored they are No. 8.
Caylan Arnold, the hero of the quarterfinal game for Tennessee, relieved Moss, but things didn’t get much better. Janell Wheaton singled in a run, and in the bottom of the second, DeWitt hit a second bomb, her thirteenth of the season, this time a three-run shot that put Florida up 6-0. Wheaton followed up her earlier RBI by doubling in another run. In classic Florida fashion, they scored seven runs on four hits through two innings.
Tennessee battled Florida starter, Kelly Barnhill, making her work deep into counts. In the third, the Lady Vols loaded the bases with two outs. Ashley Morgan doubled into the right-center gap. While two runs scored, the damage was limited with a strong throw on the cut-off by Hannah Adams to get the Tennessee runner at the plate.
The game moved along at a baseball pace, meaning slow. Both teams’ batters fouled off a lot of pitches. Both teams showed plate discipline. The umpire had a tight strike zone. At the end of the fourth inning, the game was already over two hours long. But in the bottom of the fifth, Jordan Matthews singled in a run and Florida run-ruled Tennessee 10-2.
Saturday night’s championship game between South Carolina and Florida will match two teams who in February had very different expectations about being there. Over the course of the season, South Carolina has come, however, to believe that they belong with the heavyweights. And they’ve shown that this weekend.
Mark Allister teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is completing a book on women’s college softball, Turn and Look: Women’s College Softball Is Crushing It.
