The Arizona Wildcats will open the 2018 softball season Friday with a morning game against a Big Ten team and an afternoon showdown with the nation’s 24th-ranked squad.
Over three days at the Kajikawa Classic in Tempe, the seventh-ranked UA will play five games and get an early feel for its stacked, if inexperienced, roster.
The goal is the same: To make the Women’s College World Series for the first time since 2010. The Wildcats dropped a heartbreaker to Baylor in last spring’s NCAA Super Regionals.
Mike Candrea, Arizona’s 33rd-year head coach, called last season’s exit “pretty hard.”
“If you’ve ever been in the shoes of a coach or a player that goes through that, it’s not something that leaves you pretty quickly,” Candrea. “But the lucky part about it is … you have the summer to deal with it. As you get older in life, you realize that things aren’t always going to go your way and you have to move forward.”
And the Wildcats have moved on. They’re a new team.
Eight seniors, all of whom were fixtures on the roster, have graduated. Just three seniors remain, and one of them is a Louisiana-Lafayette transfer.
“I think the big thing right now is we want to play some games. We’ve been practicing since September, but we haven’t played anyone other than a few junior colleges,” Candrea said. “So, I think this week we’re all excited to put on the uniforms and have someone in the other dugout and put all of our kids on the same team and play someone.”
Sophomore Jessie Harper said she can’t wait to get the season started.
“You can’t really measure ready, but you can measure excitement,” Harper said. “And our energy level here on the team … on a whole, we’re all super excited.”
Harper said she’s excited for her younger teammates to experience their first games. The Wildcats will play Northwestern at 11:30 a.m. Friday and Oklahoma State at 5 p.m. Games against UC Davis and Fresno State are scheduled for Saturday. The Wildcats will finish the tournament with a Sunday afternoon game against New Mexico.
“I can’t wait to be out on the field with them and our team and just see how we do this weekend,” Harper said. “It’ll definitely be a building weekend for us, but I’m excited for us and I’m excited to see where this team can go.”
Perhaps nobody’s more excited to return than Alyssa Palomino, who suffered a season-ending knee injury in May and missed the Wildcats’ postseason.
Palomino has been cleared to play, though she is still lifting weights and improving the strength both her of her quad and knee. Then there are the mental hurdles: Palomino said she overthought a simple slide into home plate last weekend, wondering which leg to lead with. Palomino said she needs to trust her instincts and not hesitate.
“It’s a game I’ve been playing since I was 4 years old, so I know what this is like,” she said.
“I think just being able to have my teammates there and saying that I can do it and I don’t need to hesitate (will help).”
Regardless of the outcome, Harper said the Kajikawa Classic will serve as an early test. The team will continue working on fundamentals, she said.
The goal is still the same: make it to Oklahoma City.
“We have a talented group of people, we have a lot of depth and I think just going through with this season, we will just continue to mature and show people that we can still play,” Palomino said. “We lost eight seniors — they were studs — but we’re focused on this year now and what we can work on making this year better.”
