Eau Claire softball pulls out four straight victories over the weekend

    With only a few weeks left of the regular season, the women’s softball team is starting to set their sights on tournament play

    More stories from Parker Reed

    Eau Claire dominated over the weekend, outscoring their opponents by a staggering amount.

    Photo by SUBMITTED

    Eau Claire dominated over the weekend, outscoring their opponents by a staggering amount.

    UW-Eau Claire women’s softball dominated over the weekend, pulling out two victories against both UW-Stevens Point Saturday and Sunday against St. Scholastica (Minn.). All the games played were also double headers. This brings the Blugolds season record to 23-9.

    An impressive aspect of Eau Claire’s performance is the large earned run differential between the Blugolds and their opponents. Over the four game stretch, Eau Claire outscored their opponents 29-8.

    Blugold senior outfielder Rachel Heffel said she is relieved the team finally found their offensive stroke again during the four game stretch.

    “We are feeling pretty good,” Heffel said. “We got our hitting back and hope that will carry over in our final week before the tournament.”

    Heffel said the team’s success is often attributed to players coming in and doing their job efficiently.

    “We’ve had a few designated hitters come in and get key base hits that we needed to score runs and it is so cool to see everybody participating and getting excited about our team and being successful,” Heffel said.

    Senior pitcher Lauren Blasczyk echoed her teammate’s mentality that the team just had to focus and do their job in order to be successful.

    “We try and take things one game at a time,” Blasczyk said. “We’ve had that mentality from the beginning and had a great start. We have a really good conference, so we had a little trouble in conference play, but we know if we focus on ourselves then we will find success.”

    The team will finish out regular season play with games through May 2. After regular season play has concluded, the team will set their sights on the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament set for the weekend of May 5.

    As the season has progressed, it has become apparent the team has become an offensive powerhouse. With the dramatic run differential (among other factors) the team has shown themselves to be one of the best scoring teams in the WIAC.

    Blasczyk said the team had to persevere after coming out on the wrong side of a few close games.

    “We’ve lost a lot of close games, I think every game we’ve lost actually has been by one run,” Blasczyk said. “That can really hurt a team, but I think we’ve been able to fight back and realize that is not the way we want to go down.”

    Eau Claire will play next against UW-Platteville in a double header on Saturday before finishing up the regular season with another double header against Saint Mary’s (Minn.) on Tuesday May 2.

    All games and in depth statistics will be available for viewing on blugolds.com.