UM softball to play thursday/friday
The Lady Wolverines will play Alabama in the Super Regionals on Thursday night at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN2. Game 2 will be on ESPNU on Friday at 4:30 p.m. ET. If a game 3 is necessary it will be played on ESPN2 at 7 p.m. Friday night.
Go Blue!
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120521/SPORTS0201/205210379
for the update. But please no "Lady Wolverines". That expression is reserved for SEC Women's sports. We dont use that in B1G Country.
Says the guy who is making demands from someone giving up their free time to allow you to access the content which you are criticising.
Who pissed in your Wheaties this morning?
Hey, I don't care if what you said was mean, let's just stay classy and watch how we spell "you're" in context, please.
Maybe, if we did, we'd start beating the SEC teams :)
Michigan is 69-33 against the SEC, 17-4 against alabama and 5-0 against the SEC this season.
Not too sure what you're talking about.
I'm remembering the road block that Tennessee was with Monica Abbott in back to back Super Regionals. And let's not forget Kentucky last year. Plus, apparently you missed my smiley face.
SEC is a johnny come lately, but theyv'e been getting better the last ten years or so. Sorry you don't like smiley faces. Apparently it was a poor attempt at sarcasm in replying to the guy above. By the way, how did that UCLA team fare this weekend?
I'm also tone deaf on message boards. And you're right about the West Coast. After all where would we be without Wagner and all the other SoCal players we have on our team. I've always liked how Hutch can bring in the Western players as well as the best of the Midwest.
Apparently we're from different generations. I've been rooting for and donating to Michigan women's sports for a long time. Nobody affiliated with the programs has ever been as touchy as this bunch.
The younger people are more bothered by it, I believe. Back when I was going to school in the dark ages, we had very few women's teams and they were all "Lady" something. Imagine how much fun that was at my high school where the team name was the "Mules".
I'm a long time lurker on these boards and only started posting a little while ago. I still have my learners permit.
That is good to know.
could say I am trying to Mgo-flirt with you. A woman who knows her softball is sexy as hell in my opinion. Many great softball players do not understand the game. They know how to play it but don't really understand it.
+100 to you, good Ma'dam.
The girls teams of Milwaukee Pius XI High School, which was a powerhouse basketball program when I was in high school, were officially nicknamed the "Lady Popes."
Best. Name. Ever.
Michigan vs Alabama comes 3 months early.
Let's hope we can pull the upset this weekend to give us a taste for 3 months from now.
M's stats http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/mich/sports/w-softbl/auto_pdf/2011-12/stats/season_stats.pdf
The defensive stats are about the same. Alabama allows 2.5 runs a game to M's 2.3. The SEC is better than the B1G, so it's probably about a wash. Like M, Bama has a strong first starter (Jackie Traina allowed 153 hits, 79 walks, 20 hr in 233 innings to Wagner's 178/46/14 in 239) and a so-so second starter (Leslie Jury 62/46/6 in 79 innings, Driesenga 124/45/8 in 124).
The Tide offense is much stronger than M's, 7.1 runs a game to M's 4.6. They draw a boatload of walks (266 to M's 188) and hit a boatload of home runs (92 to M's 46). They have 6 regulars with OBP of .436 or better and no weak links: the lowest OPS among their regulars is 855, which is above any of M's regulars except Chidester and Driesenga. Their two top power threats are Kaila Hunt (19 hr) and Amanda Locke (17 hr) and their two speed demons are Jennifer Fenton (43/45 sb) and Kayla Braud (39/44 sb). Basically this is a team full of patient, dangerous hitters. M should be able to stay with them if Wagner is on and makes few mistakes, but if she has an off day we're in trouble.
Do they have a lot of left handed hitters? And if so, do you thinik it will help Wagner?
Their website is run by slackers who didn't bother to list which way most of the players bat, so I had to look through their photo galleries to determine this. Some of them might actually be switch hitters, but that seems unlikely. The 2 big power hitters are both righthanded, but the 4 lefties are 1-2-3-4 on the team in batting average.
I don't know whether left/right is as big a deal in softball as in baseball. On one hand the mound is closer to plate so you'd think it would be bigger, but on the other hand the pitcher's windup and delivery usually has much less side to side motion than in baseball.
Thanks for the extra effort. Wagner's big weapon is her curve that sweeps away from the lefties and runs in on the righties. It's got a lot of movement and changes planes as well. She seems to be hell on lefties.
9, 1, and 2 are almost always lefty slappers, as they are for Michigan. They probably throw right and batt left. There are plenty of exceptions.
Louisville's righties adjusted to Wagner's curve by moving away from the plate. I think they could also have moved up in the box to cut off the curve without leaving themselves open to the outside fastball, especially because she does not have overpowering velocity.
I think Wagner's biggest improvement through the course of the year has been the location of her pitches. When she misses she's not leaving it over the middle like she did earlier in the year. Since she doesn't have the velocity, as you pointed out, she needs to work the strike zone and the corners to be effective.
I would love to know what Hutch saw in her as she was being recruiting. If the commentators are correct about her speed last fall, I wonder if they recruited her as a lefty change-of-pace. It has worked out well, but it seems to me that you don't need to go to California to find a 58 mph left-handed pitcher. Regardless, she has worked hard to improve, and we owe the Big ten title to her. Maybe she will be our Kelsi Dunne.
She hasn't needed help. But, if she has to pitch three days, those Alabama hitters are going to get a chance to dial in. Our hitters are going to have to come through.
Knapp had a rough Regional but Kirkpatrick and the rest of team played light's out.
Why don't they put it on Friday/Saturday night? They would get more viewers and a higher t.v. rating.
This.
They probably have big plans at the local waterpark for the holiday weekend.
I'm not sure there are a lot of people watching TV on Saturday night on Memorial Day weekend. Probably more viewers on Thursday than Saturday.
I didnt intend to create such a brew-ha-ha. We are not the Lady Wolverines. We have a gender neutral name. I am old and I dont like it one bit.
I agree that the Cali girls are the best in the country. Some of the Southern Bells are up and coming. Some of the Texas/Oka girls are pretty good too.
Midland Texas has been a powerhouse for years. But oveall, SoCal has got it good.
My daughter did a statistical project for school, attemping to correlate different background factors to college softball success. Those factors included climate, access to gold level programs, wealth, and a bunch of other things that I don't recall. But the upshot was that the only factor that she found to be predictive was height, and that did not make a lot of difference. Amanda Chidester and Sara Dreisenga are good examples of midwest girls making good.
be an interesting paper to read. My intuition would say that the #1 predictor is access to "Gold" level programs.
I have a saying to all my players. "You can't get there if you dont see it, and don't know where you are going". The message is that it is difficult to self-assess. My team has won our league year after year. Some of the girls heads get a little big. But until they see softball at the highest level, they dont know.
You can't know what you don't know. There is no such thing as sutomatic knowledge. Players have to play against good competition to see how they stack up.
which would be a direction for additional study, is that the biggest factor is coaching. It may be circular that the best coaching attracts the best players, but maybe it starts with the coaching. I wonder if it is more true in softball than in other sports. Sorry to the grammar police for misspelling "bats" earlier.
I don't know about the bones of softball development. Are there camps like in football or AAU teams like in basketball where the girls can test themselves against the upper level competition and get their names out there on the recruiting trail?
To give you an idea of my advanced years, my granddaughter, who's a heck of a swimmer and soccer player, was elected Prom Queen two weeks ago. And yes I'm bragging.
And yes get off my lawn.