After winning the America East (AE) Conference Championship for the first time in program history last season, the Binghamton softball team is looking to not just repeat its 2015 success, but to improve on its performance from a year ago.
“A goal of ours is to be better than we were last year, so hopefully that means winning another conference championship,” BU head coach Michelle Burrell said. “We’ve been working a lot as a team on things that we learned from last year.”
A leading aim for the Bearcats this season will be to improve their level of consistency. After compiling a 10-6 conference record last season, Binghamton entered the AE tournament as the third seed and dropped a matchup to top-ranked Stony Brook before rallying from the losers’ bracket to defeat SBU in the final two games of the tournament. Although the come-from-behind victory didn’t lessen the Bearcats’ eventual championship title, they would rather consistently defeat a team like Stony Brook than play in back-to-back, do-or-die games.
“We’ve been working a lot to figure out how to play consistently throughout the season with that kind of trust in one another,” Burrell said. “We’ve been working on that a lot during practices. That’s something that we can control and we want to take into every game.”
Integral to Binghamton’s journey toward improvement in 2016 will be building off the experience gained at both the AE Conference Tournament and BU’s first-ever trip to the NCAA Division I Softball Tournament, in which it was defeated by both James Madison and Fordham.
“Our goal is to have a better presence at regionals if we do win the [conference] championship,” senior utility player Griffin McIver said. “I think that we have set a standard for the program and we can build onto that with the next step.”
Fortunately for Binghamton, all but one of the players on last season’s team return to the diamond in 2016. The Bearcats have lost four-year starting shortstop Caytlin Friis to graduation but return a talented squad, including five All-Conference selections.
“I think that having so many people come back, we have an unbreakable bond, we still believe in each other and that will just propel us from the preseason into the championship,” McIver said. “What really helped us in the America East Championship was that we had that bond and we did put the team first.”
Binghamton’s offense was one of its strongest features in 2015, with a batting order that had the potential to do damage at each spot. If this season is anything like last year, senior catcher Lisa Cadogan, who hit .425 and earned All-Region honors, will once again spearhead the Bearcats’ offensive efforts. Senior right fielder Sydney Harbaugh, who was chosen as the AE Player of the Year in 2014, batted .348 and led the AE in runs scored last season and will once again serve as the spark at the top of the BU lineup.
In 2015, Binghamton ranked fifth in the conference in fielding percentage (.955) and sixth of eight teams in ERA (5.52), so defense will certainly be a point of emphasis for the Bearcats this season.
“Defensively, we’ve just continued to try to work together as a team, to be able to cover as much ground as possible, keep up communication and then just working on some more mental things as far as being able to pick each other up,” Burrell said. “We had some games last year that we kind of let get out hand and we want to be able to pick each other up.”
Both freshmen on the team, Makenzie Goluba and Allison Pritchard, are pitchers and Burrell sees them as additions that will certainly add to the depth of BU’s pitching staff, which was overworked at times last season.
“Sometimes we’ve gone through conference series having to throw one, two pitchers, so having a staff as deep as we do will really help us during the regular season,” Burrell said.
Binghamton is set to begin its journey back to the AE tournament Friday at the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic in Cathedral City, California. BU’s first game is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. against UC Santa Barbara.