Photo by Michael Montalto
The Roadrunners softball team was defeated twice by Rowan University in a New Jersey Athletic Conference doubleheader on Monday.
Ramapo fell 3-0 in the first game before suffering a 10-1 loss in the second game to a Rowan team that leads the NJAC with a 7-0 conference record and is 25-0 overall this season.
“We definitely could have played much better. We didn’t show up the way we know how to show up,” said Roadrunners’ head coach Bridgette Quimpo. “I think if it were another team of the same caliber, but we didn’t know who they were, a different team shows up.”
Rowan has yet to lose a game this season and has historically been an elite softball team in the NJAC. They are the defending NJAC Tournament Champions and won the same tournament in 2012.
The last time Rowan had more than six NJAC losses was 2007, a year the team went 9-9. Since then, the Profs have finished in the top three in the NJAC each season.
“It’s about us and proving ourselves as a team that we are much better than we are capable of knowing,” Quimpo said. “Coming in the mindset was the biggest issue to me. Forget the execution and getting it done. At the end of the day it came down to the mindset of believing that we can beat a team like Rowan.”
The Roadrunners were shutout for the first time this season in the first game on Tuesday. Rowan jumped to an early lead by scoring two runs in the first inning and then adding one more in the fifth.
Freshman Katrina Buczkowski pitched all seven innings in the first game, throwing three strikeouts and allowing just five hits.
In the second game, it was the Roadrunners who would jump out to an early lead as junior Melanie Walling hit a single to left field to bring junior Danielle Saporito home and put the Roadrunners up 1-0.
However, the Profs responded with four runs of their own in the second inning, causing Quimpo to take freshman pitcher Christina Brizek out of the game in favor of Buczkowski.
“You have to minimize as many mistakes as you possibly can and we didn’t do that so we adjusted,” Quimpo said. “We put in Katrina Buczkowski, who got it done but just lost gas towards the end of the game.”
Rowan added a run in the fifth and five more in the sixth inning en route to a 10-1 victory.
The Roadrunners are 13-7 overall and 4-2 in the NJAC after Tuesday’s losses. They will play a non-conference doubleheader against the Stevens Institute of Technology tomorrow before a streak of three NJAC Conference doubleheaders in four days.
“They are a good team to kind of prepare,” Quimpo said. “They beat William Paterson the first game and tied with them the second game so I think the preparation with having a game is going to be a great advantage for us on Thursday.”
mmontal1@ramapo.edu
