A junior’s journal: foul ball

When your life is softball, like mine, losses are your obstacles to overcome.

They're going to happen, even to the best teams. The toughest losses to overcome are the ones that you know you should have won. My team and I had one of those losses Tuesday against Tulsa.

It was just one of those games where we couldn't get anything to click. We couldn't pitch, we couldn't get the hits when we needed them and we couldn't make routine plays.

It's hard to win a softball game that way.

We had everything going our way the past two weeks. We just came off a perfect weekend, including a huge win over OU.

We felt unstoppable.

It's hard to go from that high of competition and having everything work, to a lower competition and not having a single part of our game work.

We just couldn't keep that high going Tuesday night.

Losing at home doesn't exactly help either. It's like pouring salt on a strawberry from sliding. Our coach always tells us to protect our field. We take pride in playing at home.

I will admit — we were all upset after the Tulsa game. That loss made us grow up a little bit, though.

As soon as we sat down in the team room after the game, Julie Ward said, "We are not going to let this happen again. We make sure that we never play another game like that."

Julie is a sophomore. We were all thinking the exact same thing, but to have it said out loud makes you believe it.

A sophomore spoke up and said what needed to be said. That's what shows the heart of this team. It shows that we are not going to dwell on this loss. We are going to remember it, but we are going to use it to our advantage.

We have been upset once as a ranked team this season, but we have upset four other ranked teams. Even No.1 Washington has been upset this season.

We have proven that we deserve to be ranked. This is our one upset. Our job is to keep it at one and not let it happen again. If we continue to play our game, nobody can beat us.

We're ready to get our winning streak going again this weekend and keep our losing streak at one. The Cowgirls are going to show how strong they really are.