Softball: Still shooting for the same goal

COURTESY SPORTS PUBLICITY OFFICE Haley Flynn, DC '00, gets down for a grounder.

The softball team (20-22, 5-3 Ivy) took three out of four games from Cornell (26-5, 6-2 Ivy) and Pennsylvania (10-25, 0-8 Ivy) in a pair of home doubleheaders last weekend. The 6-4 win against Cornell in the second game of the Sat., Apr. 18, doubleheader snapped the Big Red's 22-game winning streak. "It was a huge boost to our team to beat Cornell," shortstop Kathy Ching, BR '00, said.

The Ivy League champion is awarded a bid to NCAA regional play, which begins May 15. Assessing Yale's chances at winning the league title, starting pitcher Kristen Gengaro, SY '00, said, "At this point, anything can happen." Yale remains two games behind Harvard (23-20, 6-0 Ivy) in league standings. The Crimson swept the Elis in a doubleheader on Fri., Apr. 10, establishing a lead that now appears insurmountable. "It doesn't look very promising. If I were a betting man, I might want to bet on Harvard," head coach Andy Van Etten admitted.

The Elis hoped to sweep Cornell, which would have left them alone in second place, and only a game behind Harvard. "Any time you can win any Ivy [games], it feels good," Van Etten said. "It would have felt better if we had swept, and we could have swept." However, standing in the way of Yale in the first game were errors, a lack of clutch hitting, and Julie Westbrook '99, Cornell's star starting pitcher.

Errors and poor clutch hitting have plagued the team all season; the Elis have allowed an average of 1.5 unearned runs per game. In the 1-0 loss to Cornell, they gave up only one, but that was enough for the Big Red, behind Westbrook (14-1, 1.27 ERA). "We knew it would be a 1-0 game from the beginning," Gengaro said. However, Ching said that the team was hitting Westbrook, but not in the clutch: "I believed we could beat them. But we left too many runners on base." Van Etten said that mistakes have hurt the team in close games throughout the season. "We seem to have that one bad inning every game," he said. "If we can take six innings out of each ballgame we'd be in great shape."

--Carl Bialik

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