Travis Kriens

The SDSU women’s softball team was involved in some nail bitters at the Tulsa Select Festival in Oklahoma. In the end, the Jacks took one of four games over the weekend.

The first game on Feb. 20 saw the Jacks lose a late-innings lead as Creighton (Neb.) rallied to score two runs in the seventh inning to defeat SDSU 4-3.

The Jacks (2-11) broke a nine-game losing streak with a 7-6 win over St. Louis on the second game of the day on Feb. 20. Much like in the Creighton game, this one saw the Jacks lose a late-game lead with the Billikens scoring three runs in the top of the seventh inning to tie the game at six. In the bottom half of the inning, senior Brittany Postma led off with a triple and was driven in by Ashley Durazo two batters later. In addition to going 4-for-4, Postma scored three runs. Ashley Durazo went 3-for-4 with a double and four RBIs, while scoring a run.

In their third game of the day, SDSU dropped an 11-0 decision to host school Tulsa. The Jacks held the Golden Hurricane in check for much of the game, but Tulsa broke the game open with a 10-run third inning. After scoring a run in the fifth, the game was called after five innings, with the Jacks managing only a single hit.

SDSU usually does not schedule three games a day, but second-year head coach Joanna Lane said that the Jacks were in a tough spot.

“When you are in the situation that we are with questionable weather and geographic location, you always do what you can to get the games in and that’s what we decided to do.

“Tulsa is a good team,” said Lane. “I don’t think we played exceptionally well, so it is not something that you can blame fatigue on. Overall, we just didn’t bring the game that we needed to bring.”

To close out the weekend, the Jacks lost to Louisiana-Monroe 8-4. With the game tied at two, the Warhawks put the game away with a four-run fifth inning that was helped by two costly Jackrabbit errors.

The Jacks committed nine errors in the four games, including four in the opening one-run loss against Creighton.

“If you are giving away almost half of your outs (11 strikeouts), making that number of errors and you are in the game at the end, then that is exceptional, because that isn’t normal,” said Lane.

“We told the players that you are playing a very good team. If you put together a solid game, pitch well, hit well and play defense, we can hang with a lot of teams and even dominate a lot of teams.”

SDSU will hit the road again this weekend looking for wins with four games at the Razorback Invitational in Fayetteville, Ark. The games start early with a 9 a.m. first pitch against Wichita State (5-8) on Feb. 20, followed by a game against Bradley (Ill.) (6-3) right after. On Feb. 21, the Jacks will play host Arkansas (7-7) at 3:45 p.m. and end the two-day event with Ball State (Ind.) (2-3).

“You don’t want to say a win should ever be easier, because we respect all of our opponents, but there are some times when you should be able to put a little cushion between you and the other team. That’s something that we haven’t done yet,” said Lane.

“For that to happen, it will take a complete game. It will take us playing all seven innings. Right now we have a problem of having a letdown inning where we are giving up a lot of runs or going out one-two-three on offense a little too often. We need to be able to continually put pressure on teams with our offense and shut the door with our defense.”