When Ole Miss, UMBC and Villanova converged on Rita Hillenbrand Stadium for last week’s NCAA Regionals, they noted the dry heat and focused on how to stay hydrated.
In Fayetteville, things are a little different. This time, it’s the Wildcats who will be the ones adjusting … to the humidity.
UA catcher Dejah Mulipola noticed it during batting practice Thursday.
“The air is thick. It is definitely not Home Run U here,” she said. “I think it’s going to be very important to hit line drives and a lot of ground balls, this weekend.”
Arkansas has hit a bunch of their 92 home runs at home this season. Braxton Burnside hit nearly half of her 24 in Bogle Park. Though with the spring humidity increasing by the day, the ball doesn’t carry the same. The Razorbacks hit only three home runs in three games last weekend after averaging close to two per game all season.
UA coach Mike Candrea said before the series began that he still expected to see some bombs, though he noted it’s the pitchers who have the real advantage in this type of weather.
“It really, I think, helps pitchers with their break,” he said. “The more humidity, the more breaks. It’s just like you don’t want to be pitching in Colorado for the Rockies. You’d rather be pitching in New York for the Yankees. Part of that is just the humidity. The ball doesn’t carry as much, but the ball does break more and there’s more resistance in the air so therefore you can have a tendency to see more break in pitches.
“I think the big thing is just understanding that the game is played on the ground. … I still think the ball is going to carry out of here. … If you square it up the ball is going to go. I think the home run will still be a factor, but it’s definitely not something that you’re going to live by when you’re playing in a humid climate.”
Third time a charm for Wildcats?
Arkansas coach Courtney Deifel has a number of connections to Arizona and Candrea. Deifel, then known as Courtney Scott, played college softball at Cal from 2000-03, winning a World Series as a junior. The runner up that year: Arizona. Cal denied UA — and Jennie Finch — from winning back-to-back titles.
Deifel said she remember being surrounded by UA fans at the WCWS. It was enough to intimidate anyone, though Cal managed to beat the Wildcats 6-0.
Cal’s Courtney Scott, center, led the Golden Bears to a Women’s College World Series win over Arizona in 2002. Scott, now known as Courtney Deifel, is Arkansas’ head coach.
Candrea recruited Deifel’s older sister, Amanda Scott, to Arizona in the late 1990s. He said this week that he remembers sitting in her house with her dad, Ron, who was “a very good baseball coach in his own right.”
The coach-to-coach connection didn’t help. Scott went to Fresno State, where she — you guessed it — won a WCWS title by beating Arizona. The Bulldogs’ ace, she held the Wildcats scoreless in a 1-0 win in the 1998 series.
A few weeks after beating Arizona, Scott joined Wildcats Leah O’Brien and Amy Chellevold on Team USA. The Americans won a gold medal at the World Championships.
Scott is now the head coach at Missouri-St. Louis.
‘Kind’ fans in Fayetteville
Arkansas announced earlier this week that it had sold out all three games. The resulting atmosphere is loud but not necessarily hostile, said Jenny Dalton-Hill, a former UA star who now works as an analyst for ESPN.
“The Arkansas fan is what you would call a cordial fan, they are a kind fan,” Dalton-Hill said.
“(The Wildcats) are walking into a hostile environment where some of those SEC schools are not fun to play in because they’re on top of you and they’re not nice. Arkansas is not a place where you walk in — the noise is overwhelming, but you’re not being degraded while you play.
“But that’s going to be the hardest piece is overcoming that 10th person on the field which is the emotion of the fan base. If you can take the fan base out of it, your emotion can take over. But if you allow some momentum to head into this dance, that’s really difficult to overcome.”
SEC or Pac-12?
Dalton-Hill said she doesn’t see much of a difference in how softball is played in the Pac-12 and the SEC. She does, however, think the differences “depends on the coach and the style that they recruit to.”
“Some recruit to the home runs, some recruit to the speed game, some recruit to a more balanced lineup that have slappers and home run hitters,” she said. “Then, a lot of times you have to recruit to the field that you have as well some of the playing surfaces are very soft. Recruiting slappers that would play at Arizona that do the big chop slap just don’t work there. Then some fences and some parks don’t lend themselves to the longball, so you’ve got to try to figure out how to manipulate those numbers and work run production. The style of play between the SEC and the Pac-12, I don’t see being different.”
Candrea: Time for instant replay
Major League Baseball and college baseball introduced instant replay years ago, and Candrea thinks it is the right time to do the same in softball. He suggested implementing replay for the postseason to start, since many schools don’t have the technology to do it in regular-season games.
“It would be a really good benefit for us to make sure we’re getting calls right because there’s so much at stake with those calls,” Candrea said.
To implement replay right, softball would have to grow its umpire pool. Candrea has a solution for that, too.
“I really believe that there’s going to have to come a time when we need to start recruiting and training umpires the players that understand the game at this level,” Candrea said. “That’s something that I run into all the time is that I just don’t feel like umpires are prepared, as well as our athletes are prepared. And the game has kind of passed them up.
“It’s a matter of going out and recruiting young former players that want to get into that, because I think it would help our game, too.”
First softball game on ABC
College softball will be played on ABC on Saturday for the first time in history. Game 2 of the Super Regional between Washington and No. 1-ranked Oklahoma starts at noon.
Mulipola called “a huge, huge, huge deal.”
“That’s just cool for softball in general and I’m excited to see how we move forward with this sport and with televised games in the future,” she said.
