I had her throw some against Clarendon (on Friday) to get her rhythm going. I let her start today and she threw well. She faced 16 batters. That one hit was early in the game. After that it was pretty much ground balls or strikeouts.

In that last game, (the Lady Chaps) kind of got comfortable. That's why we took Sunday off and then got back to work on Monday. (On Tuesday), we only worked on our hitting and I think we'll be ready.

If you get too emotional, then your team will play with too much emotion and too much of a high. Eventually you have to come down and you may come down too hard. We don't place much too much emphasis on the opponent. We just need to concentrate on how we play. If we take care of our business, everything else will take care of itself.

I'm not going to stress out over it and I'm not going to put more emphasis on wins or losses. I'm just going to focus on getting the team prepared to compete at the highest level they can.

Their experience and pressures they had to go through last year only made them better, so when we come to those pressure situations this year, I feel comfortable they'll respond and not stress out over it.

They weren't being aggressive and they could never find their rhythm. When you have runners get on at the top of the lineup, we've got to have them produce. We'll go back and work on it this week.

They could have easily been thinking about a warm room or a warm bed, but they focused and got the job done.

It was a good start. The girls were anxious and we got some new freshmen in some new positions and I thought they played well. Our sophomores were big as well as it showed that they were familiar with what needed to get done.

Considering the conditions and how bad it really was I thought the girls did a good job of executing at the plate. Our defense just got comfortable when they made the errors. We stopped being aggressive.

I told the girls to learn from their mistakes in the first game and stay aggressive at the plate. And we did. Again, the winner came down to who made the fewest mistakes.