The schedule this season has been a grind for UCLA softball, but with two separate win streaks of ten and five games the team has answered the bell so far.
For the past three weekends, the No. 9 Bruins (18-2) have played five games in each three-day period and have not dropped a single one.
The team’s last loss came last Tuesday in a game against Cal State Fullerton, in which the Bruins only had one day to rest after their weekend set in Cathedral City, Calif.
“The game is a very physical game. The physical challenge right now, where we are in the season, there is no real time to really recover. We’re in the grind,” coach Kelly Inouye-Perez said. “We (have) got to mentally show up and get ready to compete, no matter what the schedule is.”
This week, the Bruins will have had two days of rest before they head to the San Fernando Valley to defend their five-game winning streak against the Cal State Northridge Matadors (8-15). The extra rest provides a bit of a reprieve for the team, which has had to play midweek games with only a day’s rest for the past two weeks, including its exhibition win over the Toyota women’s softball team from Japan.
“It will give us a little time to recover from the weekend … and just focus on us,” said senior outfielder Devon Lindvall.
As the Bruins prepare for their next matchup, sophomore second baseman Gracie Goulder said they will need to keep it simple and “just stick with (their) plan.”
Goulder also added that the team needs to keep the pressure on opposing teams, citing how they scored three runs early in their Sunday game against San Diego State and then added four runs in the later innings to effectively ice the game.
The team wants to put pressure on the opposition regardless of who it’s facing.
“We don’t really focus on the opponent; we focus on being able to play the game consistently,” Inouye-Perez said. “The midweek is always a challenge, so we’ve already addressed it in our approach … how we mentally prepare to (play).”
With the Bruins having been on the road for the past three weekends, they have had a chance to bond and come together as a team that plays for each other, which will become very important down the stretch of the season.
“Our team really just needs to remember to play as a team,” Lindvall said. “We all know that now it doesn’t take one person and we all have each other’s backs.”