With redemption on mind for 2024, Arizona softball's home Candrea Classic kicks off season

It’s hasn’t been often during the Arizona softball program’s 50-year history — at least over the heavy majority of the last four decades, to be sure – that the Wildcats have been unranked to start a season.

Yet that’s what third-year UA coach Caitlin Lowe and her team are facing heading into the Wildcats’ season-opening double header Thursday.

The early-season snub, if it can be called that, is likely part and parcel with Arizona missing the NCAA tournament last season for, amazingly, the first time since the latter half of the 1980s. It’s also likely a correlation with question marks Lowe hopes her team can solve as early as this week as Arizona opens up with three early-season home showcase events — the Candrea Classic (this Thursday through Sunday), next week’s Bear Down Fiesta, and the Hillenbrand Invitational the following week.

Lowe has a specific word she uses for such an anomaly in the history of one of college softball’s most storied programs: it’s “appropriate,” she says, that Arizona, 29-25 last season overall but 6-18 in the Pac-12’s regular season standings in 2023, is looking up from the outside of college softball’s leading Top 25 polls.

“I think that’s motivation for our team to basically earn everything that we get this year, and chip away and go to work,” Lowe said last week as her team prepared to kick of the season Thursday, barring weather, with games against Utah Tech at 4 p.m. and Northern Colorado at 6 p.m.

“If you look at that, to me, it’s just like, ‘OK, we have to prove ourselves this year,’ and they’ve taken it upon themselves to work that way this entire year.” Lowe added. “It’s exciting to them to take the stage.”

It’s not that Arizona doesn’t return significant firepower from a team that, despite that eighth-place conference finish, had one of the best offenses in college softball’s longtime premiere conference a year ago. The Wildcats’ offensive leaders back in 2024 include (among others) sophomores Olivia DiNardo (.382) and Dakota Kennedy (.356, 10 home runs) and seniors Blaise Biringer (.365), Jasmine Perezchica (.361), Allie Skaggs (14 home runs), Carlie Scupin (10 home runs) and Devyn Netz (13 home runs).

But when the Wildcats take the field, that’s where the curiosity is most piqued heading into ’24. In terms of fielding itself, Arizona, led by the Gold Glove-winning Skaggs, is quite sound. It’s what happens in the circle, though, that will likely make or break the 2024 season for Lowe’s Wildcats.

While Netz double-dipped as Arizona’s ace in the circle, throwing 14 complete games in 30 starts, she and Sydney Somerndike, third on the Wildcats in innings pitched last year, are out with injuries to start the new season.

“We’re trying to get (Netz and Somerndike) back as soon as possible,” Lowe said, adding, however, that “our current bullpen has trained as this staff for fall ball and most of the spring.”

Lowe cited new pitching coach Christian Conrad, hired this offseason to replace program legend Taryne Mowatt-McKinney in working with the team’s hurlers – a move Lowe said wasn’t easy, but was necessary to change the Wildcats’ trajectory – as a key toward being confident that pitchers other then Netz and Somerndike can shoulder the early-season load.

While Aissa Silva (nine starts and 54 total innings pitched last season) is the only pitcher with experience from last season available as the 2024 season gets underway, newcomer Ryan Maddox held her own during the team’s fall exhibition schedule.

“I’ve seen the (pitchers) that are competing in scrimmages right now,” Lowe said. “They have really blossomed and really just made it their own.”

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