Texas State’s season ends on second day of Austin Regional

Texas State’s last day of the 2021 season was also its longest.

The Bobcats loaded up on the team bus at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday to ride from their hotel in Austin over to Red & Charline McCombs Field. They were scheduled to face No. 12 overall seed Texas in the second round of the Austin Regional at 1 p.m. But 10 minutes later, the maroon and gold found out the game would be pushed back by three hours to 4:05 p.m. due to inclement weather.

The momentum of defeating No. 10 Oregon the night before began to drain away. The team had only been shut out three times on the year. Yet, Texas State failed to score in either of their final two games, falling 6-0 to the Longhorns and 2-0 to the Ducks in an elimination game. The last game ended at 11:55 p.m. — a 13-hour day for the Bobcats.

“I thought my kids battled all day long considering we left our hotel at 10:30 this morning and it’s almost 12:30 at night,” head coach Ricci Woodard said. “I couldn’t be more proud of this team and the year that we put together and just the way they battled all day and all year and the adversity that the year brought on.”

Texas State’s 2021 squad was mostly made up by the same players who went 15-9 in 2020 before the season was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An influx of freshman took the Bobcats to new heights, though, as Woodard leaned heavily on her first-year players.

Three batters — outfielders Hannah Earls and Piper Randolph and third baseman Baylee Lemons — saw at least two plate appearances in 75% of the team’s games. And rookie right-handed pitcher Jessica Mullins immediately became the Bobcats’ ace in the circle, leading the team with 164.0 innings pitched and going 20-6 on the year with a 1.71 ERA. The new additions boosted the maroon and gold’s record to 39-14 overall and 17-6 in Sun Belt play.

But the inexperience hurt the team at times, too. While trailing 3-0 in the bottom of the fifth against Texas on Saturday, the team put the tying run on first, loading the bases with just one out. But Texas State’s next two batters, Lemons and Earls, both struck out, effectively ending the visitors’ best chance at a comeback. It was a spot that neither player had been in before.

Woodard hopes they’ll be able to lean on what they saw this year moving forward, as the Bobcats are losing six upperclassmen. Fifth-year seniors Dalilah Barrera and Hailey MacKay already exhausted their last year of eligibility. But fourth-year players ArieAnn Bell, Marisa Cruz, Meagan King and Tara Oltmann are also choosing to forgo their extra season of eligibility.

“(Cruz) graduates in December, so she had decided she wasn’t gonna come back,” Woodard said. “But the other three are already in grad school and had kind of decided a couple of weeks ago that it was going to be too much on their plate to try to do both.”

The departures will leave Woodard with major holes to fill. The group combined to play 745 games for Texas State over the course of their careers, picking up six All-Sun Belt selections along the way. Barrera and King threw a combined 150.0 innings in 2021, representing 41% of the team’s time in the circle. Bell, Cruz, MacKay and Oltmann made 496, or 33%, of the Bobcats’ plate appearances this year.

Outfielder Kylie George will be the only player on the roster returning for her fifth year.

“It’s tough because we’re losing a great group of young ladies. You lose those six players, you know that you’re losing the core of who we are this year. And so, you know, there was a lot of tears shed and a lot of hugs and we know we’re gonna have to regroup and rebuild and figure out how to do this without six great young ladies that have left a legacy here for us to try to rebuild and re-figure out how to do this next year again.”

The team has a strong foundation to build off of moving forward. In addition to its standout first-year players, Texas State also brings back two regular starters in junior catcher Cat Crenek, who made 45 starts behind the plate this season, second baseman Sara Vanderford, who was named Sun Belt Freshman of the Year as a second-year player.

Building a new identity will still be difficult. Woodard often spoke raved about how much she liked this year’s team. It’ll be a long climb to get back to the same spot and find a group with the same chemistry.

“It was fun, you know?” Woodard said. “I mean, anytime you can go out and put together a season like this, it’s fun. You can always sit back and look at the things that could have and would have and wish, but you know, I think when you get to finish your season at this spot, you try to stick with the positives. And that’s what I just told them. You know, again, I like the way we battled, I like the way we went at it today. A couple of things needed to go our way that didn’t, that could have put us in a different spot. But at the end of the day, I thought we battled really well and that’s all I can ask out of them.