By Jacob Miller | [email protected]
After winning five games in a row and winning another Big Ten series, the Iowa softball team lost its final game against Rutgers on Sunday.
Iowa has finally found a winning groove, taking five in a row for the first time this season, and it could have been six had the team not made a costly error in the top of the seventh Sunday against the Scarlet Knights.
The third game was scoreless until the seventh, when Mallory Kilian had trouble fielding a bunt to put runners on first and second. The Scarlet Knights then got an RBI double to score what turned out to be the two winning runs — Rutgers won, 2-0.
“Defensively, we took care of the ball early, but in the last inning, we missed fielding a bunt, and unfortunately, it cost us,” head coach Marla Looper said in a release. “Offense was slow today, but we had opportunities to score early. We didn’t have many people on base, but when we did, we had chances to score them, and we didn’t take advantage of those opportunities.”
The Hawkeyes had more success in the first two games of the series.
The first game one was similar to the third in being a low-scoring affair. Neither team was able to put runs on the board until the fifth inning. Senior Kaitlyn Mullarkey continues to be on fire in the month of April, and she was 3-for-3 in the first game. Iowa scored 1 run in the fifth and 1 in the sixth and let freshman pitcher Allison Doocy do the rest. She was almost perfect, notching a career-high 10 strikeouts in seven innings and only allowing 1 hit in the team’s 2-0 victory.
“Doocy did a good job coming out of that rain delay,” Looper said in a release. “She didn’t start out very sharp, but the break allowed her to regroup and gather herself. She sharpened up her skills, and she got back out there. She was throwing solid pitches, and that was nice to see.”
The second game was a nail-biter for the Hawkeyes. Rutgers was first to score in the third inning with 2 runs, and it added 2 more in the fourth, putting the Hawkeyes in a 4-0 hole early. Iowa did not stay down long, scoring 4 unanswered runs in the bottom of the fourth to knot the game. This was thanks to an RBI double by junior Claire Fritsch and an RBI single by freshman Devin Cantu. The Hawkeyes scored again in the sixth to take the series and the game, 5-4.
“We really settled down in the fourth inning and let the ball come to us,” said Looper in a release. “We squared balls up and started to put the ball in play. We forced some action. After falling behind, it would have been easy to give up, but every past loss has been educational for us.”
The Hawkeyes struggled to get the bats going early in any of their games. The earliest they scored was the fourth inning, and that will not fly when they play against Iowa State on Tuesday and Big Ten juggernaut Minnesota this weekend.
