The Lady Wildcats softball team has earned their fifth straight and thirteenth overall trip to the ASC Conference Tournament. This year's double elimination tournament, held in Tyler, TX, features the Wildcats along with one seed UT-Tyler, two seed ETBU as well as UT-Dallas, LeTourneau, and Mary Hardin-Baylor. LC will take on UT-Dallas, the same team they faced in the season finale, in the first game of the day on Thursday morning at 10am.
The Wildcats finished the season with a 1-11 record in the month of April, falling from the third spot in the conference to sixth. The four teams that LC faced during the month are all represented in the conference tournament. Two of the them, UT-Tyler and ETBU, are nationally ranked, and UT-Dallas finished third in the conference. Of the twelve games played, six of them were decided by 2 runs or less and eight by three runs or less.
The ASC is considered one to the best softball conferences in the country year after year. This season five teams finished at .500 or better overall and nine teams getting double digit conference wins.
Coach Lyn Bankston said, "When you're fortunate enough to qualify for the ASC tournament you've got a successful program. We wish we were a little higher seed of course but we've got to have the mentality, with a double elimination, we don't want to get our backs against the wall right from the get go."
LC is certainly capable of playing with and beating any team in the conference, as evidenced by the amount of close games they have played over the last month. Coach Bankston still has faith that the hits that haven't been falling for the team down the stretch will start falling, and if they do, the Wildcats will be a very difficult team to contend with in the tournament.
LC will take on the team, UT-Dallas, that just swept the Wildcats in Pineville last weekend. Bankston said, "We knew and thought Dallas was going to be a well coached team. They're well coached and disciplined good players. They've got a lot of speed, they're gritty, its what we expected. When two good teams play it always comes down to two or three plays in a seven inning game and we just came up a little bit short."
Coach Bankston is using the series against the Comets to get his team ready to play the in opening game on Thursday. "We're working on some things this week to get some things corrected. One thing about playing somebody you just played you don't have to get a scouting report on them because you already know them pretty well up and down the lineup."
"Everybody is 0-0 now, its a new season and we just have to go into this weekend with that mentality and take one game at a time. We win that game and move on to the next game. We're just going to concentrate on doing well with whatever game we've got going on at the time."
A Wildcat victory in game one Thursday over UT-Dallas would match them up with ETBU later that day at 4pm in the winner's bracket. A loss in game one would send the Wildcats to an elimination game on Friday at 1pm, against the loser of the winner's bracket game Thursday afternoon between UT-Tyler and either Mary Hardin-Baylor or LeTourneau.
Full ASC Tournament Relese: HERE
Links to follow the Wildcats in the tournament via live stats or video: HERE.
