The softball team fell at Coast Guard 9-1 on Tuesday in the makeup of an April 1 rainout in its final action before the NESCAC Championship. The Cardinals now sit at 15-18 on the year entering the tournament, which will be held at Tufts this weekend.
Wesleyan drew first blood in the contest, as Meaghan Dendy ’10 reached on an error to lead off the game and later scored on an RBI single by Talia Bernstein ’11. The single raised Bernstein’s team-leading RBI total to 24. It was all Coast Guard from that point on, however, as the Bears scored three in the bottom of the frame and three more in the second for a commanding 6-1 lead. The Bears added one more in the fourth and two in the sixth to end the game by the eight-run mercy rule. Wesleyan was held to just two hits in the affair, the other coming off the bat of co-captain Molly O’Connell ’09 in the third.
The Cardinals will now turn their attention to the NESCAC tournament, which will be hosted by Tufts from Friday through Sunday. Wesleyan will take on Bates, the second-place NESCAC East finisher (6-6 NESCAC East, 12-14 overall), on Friday afternoon. The Cardinals have won 10 of the last 14 contests between the Bobcats, including a doubleheader sweep (11-2, 3-2) in Lewiston, Maine in 2007. (Bates won the first seven meetings between the teams, including a 23-0 victory in Middletown in the inaugural game in 1987, followed by a 31-14 victory in Middletown the following year).
The other semifinal will pit NESCAC East champion Tufts (12-0 NESCAC East, 35-1 overall) against Williams (8-4 NESCAC West, 15-15 overall). Should Wesleyan advance, it would face the winner of this game on Saturday afternoon. With a loss, Wesleyan would take on this game’s loser on Saturday morning. A pair of wins in their first two games would put Wesleyan into the championship game for the second straight season. Last year, the Cardinals lost their playoff opener to Trinity 7-0 but came back to defeat Williams (13-3), Trinity (8-2), and Tufts (3-2) on Saturday before falling to the Jumbos 10-3 in Sunday’s title game.
Wesleyan has faced neither Tufts nor Bates this season, while the Cardinals took down Trinity—which finished one game behind Bates in the NESCAC East and owns the head-to-head tiebreaker—4-1 on Monday. Dendy noted that facing a team in the tournament for the first time acts as a double-edged sword.
“It makes a slight difference because we won’t have had a chance to see any of their pitchers or their style of play,” she said. “At the same time, it acts a bit of an advantage because we won’t make any assumptions about the game.”
Friday’s game is slated to begin at 5 p.m. The entire tournament will be webcast courtesy of JumboCast at www.jumbocast.com.