Skip to main content

Lehigh Weekend: Softball Tries to Navigate the "Group of Death"

When it comes to Lehigh's spring sports, admittedly I don't follow them as closely as I do the winter sports (or, of course, football). But I do tune in when Lehigh's baseball or softball teams qualify for the postseason, and Lehigh softball is down in Gainesville, Florida to play in the Gainesville NCAA regional.

Not only this year's team playing against an incredibly challenging regional, the Mountain Hawks, led by senior P/OF Lisa Sweeney's powerful pitching, could face the No. 1 team in the nation (Florida) and faced off against a powerful Big XII team that was the subject of Lehigh softball's greatest upset ever - Texas A&M. Florida A&M rounds off the bracket - who aren't playing far from their home campus. "Group of Death" indeed.

While I was escaping from the world on Friday, Lehigh lost a heartbreaking 1-0 game to TAMU, where Sweeney only gave up four hits but one was a solo home run in the first inning to Erin Glasco that was the difference in the game:

“I thought that we honestly played toe-to-toe with them the entire time,” said Lehigh head coach Fran Troyan. “We had told the team beforehand that we felt the two teams were very evenly well-matched. Our team played very well; very solid defense. Lisa (Sweeney) pitched well and we had a couple opportunities against a team like Texas A&M and that’s all you can ask for. Hopefully we’ll take care of business tomorrow and maybe we’ll get another chance at Texas A&M or somebody else.”


Today Lehigh hopes to advance in the lower bracket against Florida A&M at 3:30 pm. Audio of the game will be broadcast free over the internet; it's days like today when I'm glad I have a laptop: yardwork will be made easier with the game on in the background.

[EDIT: Congrats to the Ladies, who beat Texas A&M again 3-2 to get a chance to knock off the No. 1 team in the nation on Sunday. They lost 9-0 after fighting hard on Sunday -but bow out with heads held high. Congratulations!]
Labels:

Comments

ngineer said…
The Lehigh Women have much to be proud...Went farther than any PL school in history and really played toe to toe with the #1 team in the country for 5 innings. They had a great season, and the seniors had a great run. Note a good number of underclassmen seeing starting time, so the future should remain bright, though replacing Sweeney will not be easy.
12:29 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....
40 comments
Read more

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...
1 comment
Read more

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.
20 comments
Read more