The University of Alabama at Birmingham Athletics
Blazer Blogs: Martina Landrum
2/18/2010 12:00:00 AM | Softball
Hey, Hey, Hey Blazer Fans!!!! Your softball girls are feeling good and very excited about this season. You have a great group of girls who believe in ourselves and have prepared ourselves well to have a winning season this year, especially with our wonderful, new facility in mind. We have made a huge step and we can see a lot of good things happening now that we have our new field.
We traveled down to Starkville, Miss. this past weekend to play in the Bulldog Round-Robin Tournament. The ladies were so prepared and had their minds focused on playing our first game of the season on Friday. Unfortunately, due to the inclement weather the game was moved to Saturday.
Although we didn't kick the season off on Friday, the girls cherished the bonding time we had at the movies, watching "Valentine's Day", which by the way is super hilarious. Thanks to our wonderful assistant coach, Lucy Bass, for setting that up. We all had a great time eating popcorn and laughing at Mississippi State girls (many of which are our close friends) because they couldn't get in due the fact we took over and were the reason the tickets were sold out.
We didn't have a chance to enjoy the beautiful snow Birmingham had to offer, but we had a much better time out in Starkville kicking off our season playing in our first tournament. We had a wonderful victory in our first game against Stephen F. Austin on Saturday. We came out swinging and ready to play. Everyone was so excited about finally playing after we had worked so hard to get to this point. We were playing with so much confidence and trusted our abilities and our potential with one goal in mind, winning. We won our first game 5-1. We started the second game against Mississippi State with the same mentality, but needless to say, we didn't come out on top. It seemed that we were a totally different team and didn't make our adjustments until the end. But we learned from that and looked ahead into the next game.
Day 2, which was Sunday, we came out again excited with the same mentality. Everyone was pumped and looking for another win. We were up against Stephen F. Austin once again. Everyone in the lineup had a hit; the hits were so contagious. There were a lot of positive things that came out of that game. We were having fun and playing the game that we love. We ended up winning, 8-1.
Now it was our chance for revenge against Mississippi State. We were so pumped that we had another chance at them. But just as our hits were contagious, so were our errors. All we needed to do was slow it down. It took us a minute to realize that we needed to calm down and relax. We were down early in the first inning, but never gave up. We kept being aggressive at the plate and kept making things happen. We gave ourselves a great opportunity to pull it off, but we were unable to finish as the winner. But I can say we put up a great battle and I'm proud of the girls for that. Unfortunately, we ended up losing 6-2.
We are heading down to the University of South Alabama Thursday to take on our second tournament of the season. We are looking to win our first tournament this season. From last weekend, we learned so many little things we needed to work on and focused on those things in our practices this week to prepare us for what's to come in this next tournament.
I want to thank all of you guys for your support and we are definitely looking for you in the stands cheering us on at our new on-campus stadium. Our first home game will be February 23, 2010 against Alabama at 6:30 p.m. We are so excited and I'm sure you are too. We need all of your support and we are looking to show you guys what we are made of and what we have been working so hard for. Go Blazers!!!
Martina
