BATON ROUGE – Head coach Yvette Girouard met with the media Tuesday to preview the upcoming week for the No. 16 LSU softball team.
LSU (7-4) faces off with Southeastern Louisiana at 4 p.m. on Wednesday before Houston, Jacksonville State and Southern visit Tiger Park this weekend as part of the Tiger Invitational.
Ashley Langoni, the reigning LSWA Hitter of the Week, paces the LSU offense with a .400 batting average to go along with four homers and 12 RBIs. She has hit safely in five of her last six games fueled by three multi-hit efforts and matched a career-best four RBIs during Sunday’s Wilson/DeMarini Tiger Classic championship game against Virginia. The Colorado native ranks in the SEC’s Top 10 in six offensive categories highlighted by her .511 on-base and .867 slugging percentages.
Kirsten Shortridge, Ashley Applegate and Rachel Mitchell, the top three hitters in the Tiger batting lineup, are all hitting over .300 and join Langoni with double-digit hits this season. Shortridge is 9-for-10 in the stolen base department, while Applegate has notched a hit in eight of her last nine games.
Courtney Hollier has emerged with back-to-back multi-hit games and a trio of RBIs to boost her average to .318 on the season. Jessica Mouse and Anissa Young have chipped in seven and five RBIs for the Tigers, respectively.
LSU’s pitching staff paces the SEC with a 1.12 ERA as Rachele Fico, Brittany Mack and Shortridge all rank among the league’s Top 11 in that category. The Tigers have only surrendered seven runs in their four losses this season.
Fico emerged with a pair of wins and saves last week, while Mack was tagged with a tough-luck loss in a 2-0 setback against No. 4 Michigan. Shortridge and Cody Trahan tallied wins in their starts against Oklahoma State and Virginia.
Live stats for Wednesday’s contest against the Lady Lions are available on LSUsports.net in addition to live in-game updates on www.twitter.com/lsu_softball.
Tickets are on-sale now and can be purchased online on LSUSports.net, the official Web site of LSU Athletics. Tickets also can be purchased in person at the ticket office on the first floor of the Athletics Administration Building or by calling (225) 578-2184 or (800) 960-8587.
The Tiger Park Ticket Trailer opens at 2:30 p.m. and Wednesday’s game marks the second of five Weekday Worker games. Fans who purchase tickets at the gate while presenting their business card will receive $3 admission and entrance into a drawing to win a prize pack. The first 500 fans also will receive a LSU softball schedule magnet featuring Mitchell, Shortridge and Trahan courtesy of The Lady Tiger Depot.
SOFTBALL PRESS CONFERENCE AT WALK ON’S
February 23, 2010
HEAD COACH YVETTE GIROUARD
Opening Statement …
“We’re going to move the game up to 4 p.m. tomorrow because it will probably be freezing by 6 p.m. The schedule has really been front-loaded, as we all knew, but I couldn’t be more pleased with the pitching so far. We’ve been in every game and have pitched well enough to win every game. In that first game against North Carolina there’s a play at the plate, and when you look at it on replay we’re safe. We didn’t get a lot of the softball gods smiling on us that first weekend. The first game in against Texas, Brittany Mack has a no-hitter going into the sixth inning, has two outs in the seventh, and we lose. We had a couple of shots to win against Michigan last weekend, but that’s the only game in all honesty where we’ve been truly overmatched. The young lady [Jordan Taylor] was really on her game, and we really didn’t have an answer to her. She is the same girl who struck out 18 a week ago against UCLA. She was a very quality pitcher.
“The catchers have really stepped up; that was a sore spot for us last year. People are going to stop running on us because we’re throwing people out now. Our defense has been outstanding. We had a miscue here or there against Michigan, but overall the defense has been incredible. Ashley Langoni made a Top 10 ESPN highlight type catch the other day at the park. In fact, the pitching is No. 1 in the SEC right now. If we have someone in the circle that can stop the other team, then we have a great chance of winning a lot of ball games. The crowds have been outstanding so far at the park despite the weather.
“Coming up this weekend we have a very good Houston team coming in. I’ve coached 30 years on this level, and I’ve always said that Kyla Hall [now Holas], who is the head coach at Houston, is the best player I’ve ever coached. She was my pitcher and clean-up hitter for me at ULL. She’s turned out to be an outstanding coach. She’ll be bringing her team in her along with Southern and Jacksonville State, who pulled a major upset over Tennessee, a team we couldn’t beat last year. They beat Tennessee and advanced to the Super Regional. Our RPI already is just outstanding. We’ve faced some tremendous pitching so far, as good as or better than anything we’ll see in the SEC. It’s just going to be a matter of putting our hitting together. We have hitters, and they are going to hit; we’re just starting a little slow right now.”
On LSU’s pitching …
“We’ve made a few mistakes as coaches in calling certain pitches in certain situations, but we’ve definitely started the right pitchers against the right teams. We’ve called the right matchup every time we’ve played. Against a great hitting DePaul team, we threw [Kirsten] Shortridge, who was down [in the zone]; they couldn’t touch her. She handled them perfectly. Against Texas, a powerful-hitting team we threw Brittany Mack, who was all off-speed and frustrated them. She threw a masterful game and deserved the win. In retrospect, I probably should’ve pulled her, but she’s from Austin [Texas] and pitched magnificently in her first start of the season. With [Rachele] Fico, we’re working on it. I still will say that she’s going to be an incredible pitcher before she leaves here. We’ve got to get a few little things adjusted, and she’s going to be dynamite. With Cody [Trahan], she’s just not in shape because of so many things that have happened to her [during the offseason]. She pitched well in six innings against Virginia, but I was close to pulling her because I could tell she didn’t have the stamina to last. I think we have four very good options.
On the expectations on Rachele Fico …
“I think she is very mature and can handle any of it. I don’t know what the fans say; I don’t have any say over that. To think she was going to come in here, throw no-hitters and shut-out everyone with this type of schedule was not a realistic expectation. She’s a competitor. She wants to get better, and she’s going to get better.”
On the lineup …
“We have to get some people hurting right now. [Kirsten] Shortridge had a horrible [offensive] weekend. She is a tremendous player, and sometimes she looks like a woman amongst girls out there. She just had a bad weekend at the plate. [Ashley] Applegate is emerging as a very good two-hole hitter. Rachel Mitchell is coming on, but she’s notorious for starting slow. There’s a juggling act going on between the four and five holes between [Anissa] Young and [Ashley] Langoni. Young looked phenomenal in Texas, but not so good last weekend. Langoni is swinging with a lot of confidence right now, and I think she’s getting the mindset that she just can’t hit a bomb every time. [Juliana] Santos hasn’t been healthy. She has some health problems right now, went through some tests and may have started playing her too soon this season. The flu/cold/stomach virus that’s been going around town hit our team, and she got it pretty bad. We sat her last weekend and will probably sit her again tomorrow night. She also had foot surgery over the fall and that’s a slow injury to heal. [Jessica] Mouse has done a phenomenal job as usual at third base and in the No. 9 spot of our lineup.”
On Courtney Hollier …
“We always say that there’s no one on this team we want to put in the lineup more than Courtney Hollier. She works hard at practice; she’s smooth. She never gives us a problem and is a silent leader for our team. When she got her chances last year, she couldn’t convert the practice player into the game player. Maybe now without the pressure of knowing she’s not going to get pulled, she seems to be more relaxed. She wants to do well so bad, and we’re just so happy she had a great weekend. We’re all very happy for her and are all Courtney Hollier cheerleaders.”