Rain delays alter schedule of Norman Regional
North Dakota State had just 90 minutes to celebrate one of the biggest upsets in the 2017 NCAA Tournament.
Ninety minutes to revel in the 3-2 extra-innings win against No. 10 seed Oklahoma and subsequently harness their emotions before facing Tulsa for a spot in the regional final.
That’s not how it was supposed to be, but weather delays forced OU and NDSU to suspend their Friday night game in the bottom of the first inning, to be completed at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday. Though Arkansas and Tulsa faced their own one-hour rain delay, the first game was able to be completed on Friday, giving those two teams a full evening of rest.
Game three, which would feature the winner of OU-NDSU against Tulsa, would begin at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday. Meanwhile the loser would get a four-hour break before
facing Arkansas in an elimination game at 8 p.m. When the schedule came out initially, Saturday games were slated to be played 1:30 p.m., 4 p.m., and 6:30 p.m. Sunday would have a 1:30 p.m. regional final game with the possibility of a 6 p.m. game, if needed.
But with the weatherrelated changes, NDSU ended up in an emotionally confusing predicament while Oklahoma waited around for four hours to fight Arkansas in a late-night battle of survival.
“You have that high and you have to come back and play right away,” NDSU coach Darren Mueller said. “I think there’s some things that potentially might have to be looked at a little bit, just to allow a team to maybe take a breath and celebrate a little bit.”
Though the schedule benefited her team, Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso didn’t like the weather-influenced adjustments either.
“North Dakota State won that game and now they have to play another one while Tulsa has been sitting around,” Gasso said. “We were just victims of the weather but when you’re in this environment, I would tell you I would swap these games around. We should be playing Arkansas now instead of tonight because we didn’t earn that right to play later tonight.”
There’s no way to control the weather, of course, but it impacted the Norman Regional in a way that could have serious implications for the teams that had to play extra games on Saturday. Even though the Bison lost its next game against Tulsa 2-1, the NDSU players didn’t blame the weather and its schedule alterations for the loss. Instead, the team embraced the challenge and believes it can work to their advantage in Sunday’s elimination game against the winner of Oklahoma-Arkansas.
“We never look at anything as a disadvantage,” said NDSU pitcher Jacquelyn Sertic, who threw 213 pitches in two complete games on Saturday. “We come from a blue collar school. We don’t have a lot of stuff. We look at the weather as advantage for us because we’re willing to play through that, work through it and use it as an accomplice in games like this.”