Around the Horn with College Softball Tournament Championship Recaps
Champions were crowned on Saturday night as the DI Conference tournaments wrapped up across the country. FPN breaks down what happened during Saturday’s Championship play.
ACC Tournament
The Florida State Seminoles earned their 15th ACC championship title with a 4-3 win over North Carolina on Saturday at Anderson Stadium. The game started out as a pitcher’s duel between FSU’s Jessica Burroughs (2017 ACC Pitcher of the Year) and UNC’s Brittany Pickett (2017 ACC Freshman of the Year) as the game was scoreless until the fourth inning. The Seminoles completed an undefeated season against ACC teams, with 24 wins in the regular season, along with three more in the ACC Tournament. The win marked the 15th ACC Championship for Florida State and the fifth under FSU head coach Lonni Alameda (2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). The Seminoles placed five players on the 2017 ACC All-Tournament Team – Anna Shelnutt, Carsyn Gordon, Jessica Burroughs, Meghan King and Tournament MVP Dani Morgan. “Consistency,” said FSU head coach Lonni Alameda, when asked about the program winning its fourth straight title. “That’s something that you talk about getting buy-in from your program from your staff to your players, to your recruits, and the standards that you set, and not waver in them. I think over time if you have pretty good success you have some standards that are very consistent with juniors and seniors to sophomores and freshmen and your staff, too. It speaks loudly to the consistency our culture and our program.”
AP goes DEEP! 💪💪💪@FSU_Softball leads 4-0! pic.twitter.com/9pY1X5NcI5
— FSU Seminoles (@Seminoles) May 13, 2017
Big 12 Tournament
The Oklahoma Sooners defeated Oklahoma State 2-0 on Saturday earning the Big 12 Championship title. The victory marked a sweep in titles for OU as it also won the regular season crown. In Saturday’s championship, OU junior Nicole Pendley hit a two-run home run in the fifth inning to break a scoreless tie and juniors Paige Parker and Paige Lowary combined on a four-hit shutout, the team’s fourth in a row and the Sooner’s 20th of the season. Parker got the start and made it through 5.1 innings before being pulled for Lowary. Parker struck out eight, bringing her career total to 700 while walking just one and allowing three hits. Her scoreless streak now stands at 37.2 innings. Lowary entered with one out in the sixth and only allowed one hit while striking out one in 1.2 innings. Prior to this season, the team single-season save record was six set in 2006. This year alone, Lowary has seven by herself. Oklahoma outscored the opposition on the weekend 13-0, joining the 1998 Nebraska squad as the only teams to not allow a run during the tournament.
Big Ten Tournament
The University of Minnesota Gopher softball team won the Big Ten Tournament Championship with a 6-0 victory over Ohio State on Saturday night. This is the second straight year the Big Ten Tournament trophy will return to Minneapolis and it was the third time in the past four seasons that the Gophers have been crowned as the tournament champs. Senior pitcher Sara Groenewegen pitched a complete game and only allowed two hits while firing in 12 strikeouts. She pitched 16 innings this weekend and only allowed two hits on her way to being named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player for the second straight year. Groenewegen moves to 30-2 on the season, with a 0.59 ERA and 280 strikeouts. After the weekend her strikeout total climbed to 1,187 career strikeouts and during the Championship game, she passed Sara Moulton and is now the all-time Gophers career strikeout leader. Junior Sydney Dwyer had another heroic game at the plate. Her walk-off home run earlier in the day against Illinois sent the Gophers to the championship, but she was just getting started. Dwyer stepped up with two outs in the fifth and launched a no-doubter over the wall to break the 0-0 tie and gave the Gophers all the momentum they would need to earn the championship title. The Gophers move to 54-3 overall on the season and have won 25 straight games.
Great stuff here:@GopherSoftball and @LisaByington try to get Sara Groenewegen to sing.
“I’m not singing on TV!” https://t.co/oQQiMl6bH9
— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) May 14, 2017
SEC Tournament
The Ole Miss Softball team defeated LSU on Saturday night in a convincing 5-1 victory at Lee Stadium to earn the SEC Tournament Championship title. The Rebels had never made it to the semifinal round of the SEC tournament prior to Saturday. After defeating Alabama 4-1 in the Saturday afternoon matchup, the Rebels went on to do the unthinkable of winning the title. Rebel pitcher Kaitlin Lee pitched every inning of the tournament and went 4-0 in the circle earning her Tournament MVP. Lee opened up the tournament with wins against Mississippi State and shutout the No. 1-ranked Florida Gators. The 5-foot-6 right-hander from Gulfport, Miss., pitched last year at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College. Ole Miss was her only big-time offer. She entered the tournament a modest 16-10, including a pair of losses to Tennessee in March. But she had magic in Lee Stadium this past weekend. She didn’t walk a batter until the seventh inning against Alabama, her 21st inning of the tournament. In 28 innings she struck out 12 and allowed only three runs. “We’re not a softball school,” Ole Miss coach Mike Smith said. “We never have been. But now we have to be in the talks. “Our University needed something like this right now.”
