As the Elon University softball team entered the grind of Southern Conference play with a weekend series against Western Carolina University March 14, the team was 16-5-1, and beginning to gain chemistry.
The Phoenix was on a seven-game winning streak and had dominated its two home tournaments to the tune of a combined 7-1 record when it was brought back to reality with a 5-0 loss to Syracuse University. The loss allowed the Phoenix to regroup and refocus for their series against the Catamounts.
The Phoenix began play in a Southern Conference that, as head coach Kathy Bocock said, is the strongest it’s been in recent memory, with several teams having a realistic shot at winning the title.
“This conference is going to be strong, top to bottom,” Bocock said. “We can’t relax and think we’re going to cruise through a weekend, because that’s not going to work.”
The Phoenix went to Cullowhee, N.C. to face Western Carolina, and although it didn’t win the series — Elon lost two of three games — the Phoenix took away a bevy of positive signs from its tough weekend. Chief among them is the experience the underclassmen gained in their first games in a hostile atmosphere against a talented conference foe.
“It was like the young kids hadn’t played any games yet because they were all really nervous,” Bocock said. “They know now that this is what a SoCon game on the road is going to be like. They thought they had adjusted to the college game, but conference games are a whole new adjustment.”
Senior second baseman Lauren Oldham said it was the perfect opportunity for her and her teammates to see where they stood at this point in the season and what they still need to improve upon.
“We struggled offensively,” she said. “We were putting the ball in play and getting our hits, but we couldn’t string anything together. So we need to go back to our mentality that gave us so much confidence earlier this season.”
It’s difficult to start the conference slate with two straight road series — Elon’s next opponent is Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga., starting March 22 — but it’s more experience for the underclassmen to grow, develop and become more comfortable in road settings.
“I think it’s actually better to have two conference road series under our belts,” Oldham said. “All our nerves will be gone, and we’ll be able to handle road crowds better by the time we get home and get some of our losses back.”
Bocock said she sees the benefits in playing early-season conference road games, difficult as they may be for a young, inexperienced team.
“It’s tough,” Bocock said. “You may not get a lot of wins early on, and you hope that doesn’t go against your confidence, but you do what you can and pick up a win here and there and before you go home and level the playing field and recover some wins.”
The Phoenix knows it will be difficult to win the conference given the quality of depth from top to bottom in the league. But it can find the motivation necessary to get the job done in the low expectations of the league’s other coaches and media personnel, who picked them to finish seventh out of eight teams in January’s preseason poll.
“Our ranking is in the back of all of our minds,” Oldham said. “It’s definitely given us a little bit of a chip on our shoulder and motivated us to go out every day and work a little harder to prove people wrong.”