BATON ROUGE, LA. – LSU Softball had high expectations for themselves going into this season. The Tigers played six games throughout the weekend finishing 4-2. However, that winning record doesn’t cut it for the head coach Beth Torina and her staff. They’re figuring out how to coach up their younger players.
“Where are we with them, do we keep challenging them, we’ve been challenging them, or do we need to remind them how great they are because they’re really talented players like it’s a catch 22, a little bit of how much challenge you give them versus how much reinforcement are we going to give them this week to just remind them that they’re great? You know, they’ve never been in these spots before,” said LSU softball head coach Beth Torina.
“I’ve always dealt with nerves, but it helps having a mature pitching staff like help from our fifth-year show is sensory and our two juniors slash seniors, Allie and Shelby. They always just calm me down, you know, give me the game plan, and having an amazing pitching coach like that is great,” said LSU freshman pitcher and Bossier City native, Raelin Chaffin.
“We have a phrase here like, you can’t be crazy. That’s ultimately what we missed this last weekend. You know, like we just we weren’t the LSU team that we know we can be. I think that now that we have the jitters out of the way, we have several girls who have now played their first collegiate game,” said LSU 5th year pitcher/utility Shelbi Sunseri.
“I think we’re still learning this group. They’re young. They want to be great, they almost want to be great too badly at times. I think that we’re learning and we knew that these six games would hopefully show us about them, but also create a whole new list of things that we need to tackle,” said Torina.
The Purple and Gold face a very experienced Oklahoma State team in Clearwater, Florida on Friday with 10 seniors and grad students combined.