The Ducks softball season ends with a 9-0 loss to Oklahoma State in Game 2 of the Stillwater Super Regional.
Where everything went right in the regionals for the Oregon Ducks softball team, it was quite the opposite in the Stillwater Super Regional.
The Ducks’ season ended at the hands of Oklahoma State with a 9-0 loss in Game 2. The Cowgirls advance to the Women’s College World Series in Oklahoma City with Oregon finishing its year with a 38-17 overall record.
In the two games of the Super Regional, the Ducks scored a total of one run. Not only that, but the Cowgirls retired 36 straight batters over the course of the two contests. An Allie Bunker single to center broke up the perfect game
Oregon’s last base runner came in Game 1 during the second inning when Alyssa Daniell singled home KK Humphreys for the Ducks’ lone run.
OSU pitcher Kelly Maxwell needed an even 100 pitches for the complete game shutout.
It’s a stark contrast from the Regionals where the Duck offense exploded for 29 runs in the three games, including wins of 10-4 and 14-4 over host Arkansas.
This was the first time Oregon had advanced to this round of the NCAA tournament in five seasons and the first under head coach Melyssa Lombardi. The goal in Year 6 has to be to return to Oklahoma City.
One of the best times on the sports calendar is March because of all the post-season tournaments that are happening all at the same time.
The same thing happens in May, but Pac-12 fans don’t have a clue because this conference doesn’t have a conference tournament in either baseball or softball.
Exposure has always been troublesome for the Pac-12, but in particular, these sports. Oregon baseball coach Mark Wasikowski and softball coach Melyssa Lombardi both hope that not having a Pac-12 tournament will be something of the past in the near future.
“The league is tough,” Lombardi told The Oregonian earlier this month. “I think for us as coaches and with our teams figuring out what’s the best way to go, is it having your conference games and then having a tournament right after or not. I think that’s something that’s come up and so far up to this point there hasn’t been a conference tournament.”
Having a conference tourney on national television, such as ESPN or Fox Sports 1, would be the exposure they need to bring in better athletes as well as possible seeding in the NCAA tournament. Softball felt that earlier when it was assumed the Ducks would host a regional, but instead was made to go to Austin, Texas.
The tournament committee wasn’t in a room watching how good Oregon was in a post-season semifinal or final. They were looking at the Ducks on paper instead.
Oregon baseball is hoping they don’t suffer the same fate as softball. The Ducks are one of the best teams in the nation, a top 10 team for most of the season. Instead of making active preparations for PK Park to hold the Eugene Regional, the social media people for the Ducks are tweeting out fancy graphics to explain why they are worthy to host three other teams at PK Park.
— Oregon Duck Baseball (@OregonBaseball) May 30, 2021
Wasikowski expressed this concern in that same article in The Oregonian.
“They’re (the NCAA tournament committee) not watching Oregon play at Cal Berkeley this year because that’s where our last series is. That’s not going to be on their screen. They’re going to have all the conference tournaments on watching all those winners to where they can fill out basically their brackets and put the teams into the postseason slots.”
The Pac-12 was scheduled to have a baseball tournament in Scottsdale, Ariz. this year before the pandemic hit. The conference is seemingly going in a very different direction with its new commissioner George Kliavkoff at the helm and hopefully, in 2022, everyone will get to enjoy the conference tournaments on diamonds.
Oregon might have a problem that needs to be fixed with softball players entering and then leaving Melyssa Lombardi’s softball program.
It may be nothing. Really, it could be just nothing.
College athletes come and go these days via the transfer portal. It happens every year to every single school in every single sport. The NCAA has made it extremely easy for student-athletes to change schools since they don’t have to sit out a year after transferring. Kids are even switching schools within the same conference, something that was rarely done just five years ago.
It is especially prevalent when a new coach comes to town.
But then again, for the Oregon Ducks softball team, it may be something. And if it is something, Oregon and its athletic director Rob Mullens have a problem.
That problem is players entering Melyssa Lombardi’s softball program and then almost immediately as soon as they can, they leave her softball program.
The departure of all-Pac-12 selection Alyssa Brito, Mya Felder, and Jazzy Contreras brought back bad memories of the mass exodus of players when Lombardi was hired in 2018. But those players stayed, saw her off-season program, and then decided to bolt.
Most of those players, such as Lauren Burke, Maggie Balint, Miranda Elish, and a whole host of others that decided Oregon and Lombardi’s way of doing things just wasn’t for them. It got so bad that the Ducks were calling for open tryouts on campus just to fill out a 2019 roster.
Kelvin Kuo-USA TODAY Sports
Some of those players who left went to Texas to play for their coach Mike White. That’s understandable and it happens all the time. But Brito, Felder, and Contreras didn’t play for White.
Contreras hardly played in her two years in Eugene, so her leaving wasn’t exactly a surprise. She wants more playing time and hopefully, she finds that elsewhere. But Brito and Felder are curious cases.
Felder was one of the Ducks’ best hitters in 2020 as she hit .356 in Oregon’s 22 games that were played before the pandemic. In 2021, it seemed like she continued where she left off, batting nearly .400 through March. But then Felder was plagued with a two-month slump that not only saw her average dip to .274, but her place in the order went down and most likely her confidence.
It’s unusual for a hitter that good go through a slump for that long. It begs the question of whether something was going on behind the scenes. If she was injured, Felder likely wouldn’t have been out there.
As for Brito, there was no slump. Actually quite the opposite. She played outstanding the entire season both in the batter’s box and in the field at shortstop. She hit .299 with 10 homers and drove in 31 runs. Everything was going her way.
But her announcement to transfer came just days after the season ended. Although it’s easier and common, players don’t take this particular decision lightly, so it’s very possible that when Brito was playing in the Austin Regional, she knew her playing days as a Duck was nearly over.
For Oregon and Lombardi’s sake, hopefully, it’s just these three that have decided to leave. The off-season isn’t even a week old, so odds are, there will be more players exiting Eugene.
The third-year coach has proven she can bring in the talent. But can she keep it? If not, Mullens has to address whatever issue that lies beneath and fixes it now.
It’s that time of year that every college sport dreads these days. It seems like right after a season ends, players decide to use the transfer portal to get out of dodge.
This time it’s Oregon softball’s turn to feel its effects with the big loss being shortstop Alyssa Brito seeking greener pastures elsewhere. Along with the all-Pac-12 selection, infielders Mya Felder and Jazzy Contreras have put in their transfer papers as well.
Losing Brito is going to hurt the Ducks. It’s hard to find a shortstop that can both be a slick fielder and hit as she can. Brito was one of the top prep players in the country when she signed with Oregon and in her one and only season as a Duck, she didn’t disappoint.
She finished the season with a .299 average with 10 home runs and 31 runs batted in. In the Austin Regional, Brito went 4-for-14. But her play at shortstop was something to behold as she made several key plays to either end innings or to stop potential scoring threats.
Felder was a key component for the 2020 Ducks that went 22-2 before the pandemic forced a shutdown of the season. The sophomore from Fresno, Calif. hit .356 with two homers and 10 RBIs for that first season and Felder got off to a hot start in 2021 before her bat went ice cold.
The designated player was hitting .390 through the month of March and then once the conference season got rolling, Felder’s bat didn’t. Her spot in the batting order kept dropping and eventually she finished this season with a .274 batting average with five home runs and 21 RBI.
Contreras just played in two games this season and 13 games overall in her two seasons for the Ducks where got received one at-bat.
Whether Oregon Ducks softball head coach Melyssa Lombardi can replace talents such as Brito and Felder remains to be seen, but it won’t be easy.
Oregon softball ends its two-year hiatus from the NCAA tournament, but in a surprising move, Eugene wasn’t selected as a Regional.
It’s been several years, but the Oregon Ducks softball team is back in the NCAA tournament. Unfortunately, in a surprising turn of events, the Ducks will not host a Regional despite a 37-15 overall record and finishing third in the Pac-12.
Instead, a date with former coach Mike White is on the horizon as Oregon will travel to No. 12 overall seed Texas and play in the Austin Regional alongside Texas State, Saint Francis (PA), and the host Longhorns.
The Ducks open up with Texas State Friday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m. and will be streamed on ESPN3. The Bobcats finished the regular season with a 38-12 overall record. Saint Francis, who comes into Austin with a 40-8 mark, will take on the 39-11 Longhorns to open up the double-elimination Regional at 3 p.m. PST.
The various NCAA committees have had a history of setting up matchups that might be intriguing to fans as well as the media and have passed them off as coincidence. But pitting the Ducks against the coach that put the program on the map isn’t a coincidence.
White left the Ducks for Texas after taking Oregon to the 2018 Women’s College Series. In White’s last season, the Ducks went 53-10. When he left, the Ducks hired Melyssa Lombardi and after a mass defection of players, it took her just one full season and part of 2020 to get the back to prominence with an NCAA tourney birth.
In order to set up this “coincidence,” Eugene was passed over as a Regional site. Texas hosting a Regional isn’t a surprise. Oregon not hosting certainly is. If Oregon should get out of Austin as the winners, the Ducks will most likely travel to Tuscaloosa to face the No. 4 overall seed barring a giant upset.
According to the NCAA RPI rankings, the main formula the committee usually looks at when determines sites, the Ducks were No. 15. But Oregon was passed over for the likes of Duke, Kentucky, Arizona State, and Washington.
The Ducks had a better conference record than Arizona, ASU, and Washington, and Oregon has a better RPI ranking than Regional hosts Washington (16) and Kentucky (18). But for whatever reason, Jane Sanders Stadium was passed over.
UCLA, the defending national champions, is the No. 2 overall seed with its 41-4 record with two of those four losses coming to Oregon. The Pac-12 received six bids with Stanford also getting an at-large.
It wasn’t all disappointing news for Ducks, however. The Pac-12 announced its annual awards and Oregon was properly represented. Allee Bunker, Haley Cruse, and pitcher Brooke Yanez were all First-Team conference selections. Alyssa Brito and Terra McGowan were on the Second Team with Hannah Delgado on the Third Team.
Brito and Bunker were on the All-Defensive squad with Brito and Delgado on the All-Freshmen team.
