April 4, 2001
| Ramona Shelburne |  | Year: Senior
Position: OF
Height: 5-2
Hometown: West Hills, CA
High School: El Camino Real
Major: American Studies |
|
Pacific 10 Conference softball.
I've been sitting here for twenty minutes staring at the computer screen trying to find a way to describe it but really there's no way so I just let the sentence stand on its own.
For those of you who don't know, the Pac-10 Conference has undeniably, hands-down, no doubt about it, the toughest softball teams in the country. Four of the Pac-10's eight teams are ranked in the top five in the country, and seven are in the top twenty. The only team who is not ranked is Oregon and they're the kind of team that can beat anyone on any given day.
Just to give you an idea of how the Pac-10 stacks up against the rest of the country, the combined record of all the teams so far this year is 234-50-1. Scary huh?
Well, now is the time in the year where we take turns beating each other up every weekend and see where the chips fall. To find out which teams will rise to the top and which teams fold and crumple under the pressure.
They say, whoever "they" are, that sports are about finding out your true character, "seeing what you're made of." This is the time of the year when that statement becomes a daily reality. Every day, every game is a challenge, a battle.
If you have a bad at-bat (which is fairly common against the numerous All-American pitchers in this league), do you get down and go "o-fer" the rest of the day or do you regroup, make and adjustment, and figure out how she beat you last time?
In the Pac-10 season, you don't have time to get down on yourself or else before you know it, you've gone 0-20 or something or lost three games in a row. And the opposite is true as well.
Take last weekend for instance. On Friday, we upset UCLA, who came in ranked #1 and undefeated. But we lost 5-1 the very next game against Washington, who was ranked #15. Where's the logic in that?
We basically had about 12 hours to enjoy the win over UCLA and then go back to battle against Washington. Unfortunately, I think we took a little longer than those 12 hours and the Huskies made us pay. I wouldn't call it a letdown though. More like we let our guard down for a minute. We scored a run early in the game against Washington and kind of sat on it. In the Pac-10 that's like playing with fire and this time, we got burned.
The next day though, we came back and won 4-1. We scored early again but didn't stop this time and kept adding runs to our lead all through the game. In the end, every single run came in handy as Washington loaded the bases in the bottom of the 7th with one out and easily could've tied the game with one more hit had we not scored an insurance run in the top of the inning.
Lesson learned.
Let's just hope we don't have to re-learn that anymore this season.
