The Teams
Saint Mary's Cardinals (9-1 MIAC, 19-5 Overall)
vs.
Gustavus Gusties (9-1 MIAC, 15-5 Overall)
The Vitals
Saturday, April 21 • SMU Field • 1 p.m.
Last Action
The Cardinals extended their conference winning streak to nine and their overall winning streak to 13 with a 3-0, 9-1 sweep of Carleton last Wednesday. … Gustavus, meanwhile, kept pace with the Cardinals atop the MIAC race with a 6-2 win over Carleton on Thursday in a game that was rescheduled due to rain.
Last Meeting
The Cardinals picked up the MIAC sweep vs. Gustavus in St. Peter, Minn., but it wasn't easy as SMU posted wins of 5-2 and 4-1.
Conference Standings
Through Friday, April 20, 2001
This and That
With the 12-1 scoring edge vs. the Knights, the Cardinals have now outscored their opponents 105-15 during their 13-game winning streak. … Jill Hocking (Apple Valley, Minn.) posted her seventh straight win with a one-hit, complete-game shutout of Carleton in Game 1, while Jennifer Gonerka (St. Paul, Minn.) pushed her record to a team-leading 8-1 by winning her fifth straight decision in Game 2. … With a 1-for-3 performance in Game 1 and a 2-for-2 effort in Game 2, Hocking has now hit safely in 13 straight games, dating back to an 0-for-2 showing in the first game vs. St. Thomas on April 4. … Hocking, Lindsey Smith (Elma, Iowa) and Jennifer Meyer (Oconomowoc, Wis.) have all had one 4 RBI game, while Hocking leads the team with 9 multiple-hit games. … The Gusties come into today’s game having won eight of nine MIAC games, with their lone loss a 3-2 decision to St. Benedict. … Saint Mary’s has beaten Gustavus nine straight times — outscoring the Gusties 74-9 — dating back to a 3-2, Game 2 GAC win on April 6, 1996.
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CARDINAL PROFILELindsey Smith
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Spot atop the conference standings on
the line as Cardinals play host to Gusties
WINONA, Minn. — The Saint Mary’s University fastpitch softball team has put up some lofty numbers through the first 10 games of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference season — not the least of which is the Cardinals’ current nine-game conference win streak and their league-leading 9-1 record.
But … .
The Cardinals might want to consider putting an asterisk next to their red-hot conference start.
After all, their two games against defending conference champion St. Thomas — in which the two teams split — were the only contests against teams in the top half of the standings.
Sweeps of Macalester (1-9 in the MIAC), St. Olaf (1-5), Augsburg (2-6) and, most recently, Carleton (2-8) may have put the Cardinals in the league’s catbird seat, but SMU coach Nikki Fennern knows better than to think that returning the MIAC’s regular-season championship — which SMU held for three straight years prior to finishing second to the Tommies a year ago — to Winona is going to be a walk in the park.
“We’ve tried to approach every game the same, but we also know that we haven’t faced the toughest part of our schedule yet,” said Fennern, whose team has outscored its five conference opponents 81-11 and has won six of the 10 games by the eight-run mercy rule. “We realize that we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Beginning this afternoon against fellow conference leader, Gustavus.
“We need to make sure to put our best game on the field every single day,” admitted Fennern. “We know that we have the capability of beating any team we face, but we also know that we can’t afford to overlook any opponent — any one of them can knock you off on a given day.”
Carleton nearly did just that, trailing by a slim, 1-0 margin heading into the bottom of the sixth inning of the opener. From there, however, the Cardinals showed just why they are the defending national champions and currently the top-ranked NCAA Division III team, scoring a pair of sixth-inning runs to ice the 3-0 Game 1 win, then leaving little doubt in Game 2 with a 9-1, six-inning rout.
“We came out unusually flat, and that’s something we cannot let happen,” Fennern said. “We hold our destiny in our own hands. We just need to stay focused on the task at hand and go out there and do what we need to do to get the job done.”
An approach that, unfortunately for the rest of the conference, has worked to near-perfection thus far.