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“We went toe to toe with a top level Michigan team that has a long history of success,” UNC coach Dedeann Pendleton-Helm said in a text message Saturday evening. “No game is won or lost on one ball or play.”
It's been a while since there was front page discussion of softball at MGoBlog. I wrote a softball preview nearly two months ago and I haven't written anything since, with the churn of basketball and hockey season consuming my time. But after an eventful weekend for softball, building on a couple of positive weeks, it's time to check back in. We'll give a brief recap of the season, talk about the recent offensive surge (the team's biggest storyline), briefly mention pitching, and then look at the road ahead. A brief season recap Michigan Softball currently sits 24-11, 6-0 in B1G play. The path to this point has not been consistent or straight forward, an incredibly choppy non-conference portion of the schedule followed by a rapidly improving performance in conference play. The team started the season in Tampa with a 5-3 win over Illinois State, lost a 1-0 shutout to USF, but then closed out the opening weekend with three narrow wins over Bethune Cookman,
Caviness’ perfect game was the first for UNC softball as a Division I program. She is from Thornton and played scholastic softball at Holy Family Academy in Broomfield.
Sooooooo yeah. The last time I wrote about Michigan Softball was late April, when they had three weekends left in the B1G season. They were still in the field for NCAA Tournament projections at the time and I felt that a solid close to the regular season would likely be enough to get the Wolverines into the tourney. Which, for a rebuilding season, would have been a fine outcome. That is emphatically not what happened. Michigan Softball lost an infuriating extra inning game to Northwestern, destroyed the 'Cats on Saturday, and then lost a comedy of errors umpiring show on Sunday. That was an okay result, but everything that followed was a catastrophe, back to back sweeps at the hands of a pair of good B1G teams in Minnesota and Indiana. A 1-8 record over the final nine B1G games plummeted Michigan to 10th in the conference standings, forcing them to need a miracle in the BTT to make it in. They didn't get one, rather a first round exit at the hands of Penn State. So here