Losing the road game at Florida State was a crucial blow to the Texas Tech softball team’s overall resume. Gerry Glasco knows the Red Raiders needed that matchup with the Seminoles to bolster the team’s overall RPI.
Though Texas Tech (38-2) has a victory over Florida State this season, the return game in Tallahassee was supposed to be a marquee game of the college softball schedule last month. Travel logistics made the game impossible to play, and Glasco knew the team needed to pick up a few games to make up for it.
While the top-ranked Red Raiders’ trips to Utah State, UTSA and Texas State won’t come close to matching the would-be game with FSU, it’s the best Texas Tech could do in a pinch. Putting those three games immediately after their Big 12 Conference road series at Utah also gives the Red Raiders an early postseason-like experience at the tail end of the regular season.
“I think it’s a way for us to test ourselves and push ourselves, challenge ourselves that’ll make us a little bit tougher down the stretch, hopefully,” Glasco said. “And I’m hoping we come out of it even a better, more cohesive team and unit.”
Texas Tech enters the weekend 11th in RPI, a significant metric when determining the NCAA regional and super regional fields.
Glasco said most teams would lack the bodies on offense to go through a stretch such as this, but he’s more concerned about his pitchers and catchers over the next week.
NiJaree Canady, named Big 12 Conference pitcher of the week, has been putting in more innings to get herself ready for a postseason run. Glasco said he could envision a scenario where Canady starts three of the team’s six games on this road trip. Kaitlyn Terry also needs to get some more innings under her belt thanks to Texas Tech’s constant run-rule victories. Nice as those triumphs are, Tech’s pitchers haven’t gotten the full gambit of innings to this point.
“This team’s doing a lot of things that I’ve never coached a team to do offensively,” Glasco said.
As a team, Texas Tech has struck out 89 times, hit 82 home runs and drawn 188 walks.
“Just some really rare, freaky, once-in-a-lifetime numbers that we’re seeing put up and hopefully we can continue to build on that,” he said.
Thanks to Terry’s arrival in Lubbock, Glasco hasn’t had to overuse Canady’s arm like last year. Now with the postseason coming up (15 regular season games remain) Canady’s starting to get more time in the circle and Glasco is starting to see the dominant pitcher he’s come to know.
“I felt like that the beginning of the season, we took so much time off, which I knew would be really beneficial to us as the season progressed to have her healthy, fresh, have her body strong,” Glasco said, “and she spent so much time on conditioning and getting her body ready for the season, but not pitching.
“Now as we’ve gone through the season, her velocity is up, her control’s getting better, her strikes now, her swinging misses, everything’s going up, and she’s right where we hope she would be and maybe even more so.”
Hailey Toney starting to heat up for Texas Tech softball
Sophomore shortstop Hailey Toney is one of three players to earn the captain’s “C” on the shoulder of her uniform. Talented as she is, Toney hit a bit of a slump a few weeks ago after dropping down the batting order in favor of Terry, who leads the team with a batting average of .525.
Toney has started to get things going again as of late. After hitting under .250 in her previous eight games, Tony’s back into .500 territory at the plate over Tech’s last seven games. Glasco has noticed her confidence coming back as well.
“I think her average has gone up like 30 points in the last two weekends,” Glasco said of Toney. “I feel like she kind of hit that little sophomore lull there a little bit, and we saw her maybe doubting herself a little bit, and then her confidence has soared back up. She just plays with so much confidence and swagger in these last, especially last weekend. I think we’re going to see the best of Hailey Toney right down the stretch through the stretch run like we did last year.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech softball starting to ramp up to prepare for postseason
Reporting by Nathan Giese, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
