Softball Mocs ‘confident’ despite start
At first glance, it’s easy to stare at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga softball team’s record and consider the season far low of the expectation set forth during Frank Reed’s long tenure as head coach.
And perhaps, you’d be right: The Mocs, the defending Southern Conference champions, begin conference tournament play at 24-25 overall and a 7-11 mark in conference play.
There are also reasons to feel confident about the team going into the tournament. For one, seven of those losses have come on walk-offs, meaning the other team scored and UTC didn’t have a chance to respond. Also, five of those defeats against SoCon competition were one-run losses that could have been different with a hit there, a strikeout there, etc. (and that doesn’t even include a 7-4 loss to Samford last Saturday where the Bulldogs hit two home runs in the 11th inning to pull away and win.)
But one of the biggest reasons to believe this team — a young one that lost over half of its lineup from last year and is missing Kailey Snell, one of its top returning players due to injury — is the fact the tournament is in Chattanooga, where the Mocs have won seven of the 11 championships played at their home site.
This team knows the history. It also knows that entering Wednesday’s 3 p.m. game against third-seeded Furman — a team the Mocs swept a couple weeks ago — it won’t be a favorite, nor should it be based off an 18-game conference sample.
It’ll also help that Frost Stadium — which hasn’t been available until recently due to renovations — is up and running. Reed mentioned that playing on
some of the side fields led to a number of issues.
“I don’t really think that we’re the favorite,” junior Kaili Phillips said after Saturday’s doubleheader. “I think that having the atmosphere that we’re going to have, having our freshmen experience the atmosphere that we have here in our hometown is going to be a factor. The challenges that we’re going to face as far as pressure goes, I feel like it’s going to be off our backs because we have nothing to lose.
“Basically, everybody is 0-0. There’s no telling what happens as soon as the tournament starts; anybody can win. It’s anybody’s game.”
Phillips is one of the returning players who was huge in last season’s tournament run. So is sophomore first baseman Acelynn Sellers, a former Baylor standout who got an opportunity to have a huge role a year ago. But they are the exception on this season’s team — not the norm.
“I feel like we’re stringing things together,” she said. “We’re trying to play as a team, but we’re just not getting those breaks that we normally got last year. We kind of just busted it open last year, and I think it’s more of a different approach to do that this year. We’ve been waiting for that one moment where we get that huge break; we’re all fighting and pushing to do that. It’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen.
“We’re fighting and fighting and at some point we’re going to knock someone out and then continue to just roll.”
Reed admitted Monday evening that he hasn’t always put as much stock in the regular season conference play, so he’s rested Brooke Parrott (one of two seniors on the roster) in an attempt to get more experience for the rest of his staff, which has four pitchers, none of whom have thrown more than 87.1 innings. He wants to win, of course, but he wants to make sure his team is best prepared to win a conference tournament championships — which he considers “a big piece of the prize.”
So has the team looked dominant, or even good, for big portions of the season? No. But does he believe they can figure things out over a four-day period this week? He does.
“There’s going to be a lot of teams that don’t get to play in the national tournament,” Reed said. “That’s the thing we always want to shoot for, because only one team is going to regionals, so that’s the big prize for us and we’ve just got to focus on that.”