Softball tops Cajun athletic year
Mitchell’s clutch pitching carries Cajun softball to Women’s College World Series
LOUISIANA La. — It would have been easy to surrender to the pain, but Brooke Mitchell would not.
Despite an injury to her pitching arm, the gritty Mitchell pitched UL Lafayette’s softball program into a fourth appearance in the Women’s College World Series.
Giving in to exhaustion would have been understandable at the end of a long campaign, but members of the Ragin’ Cajun football team refused to end their season on a down note.
The result was a stirring 57-51 quadruple overtime road victory over Middle Tennessee in the season finale, completing a streak of four wins in five games to end the campaign.
Those two performances stepped front and center as the most memorable in Ragin’ Cajun athletics for 2003, the top items on an unofficial list of highlights.
Softball returns to WCWS
Surprising no one, coach Stefni Lotief’s Cajuns won another Sun Belt Conference softball championship in May by defeating Western Kentucky 2-1, Florida International 6-0 and FIU again by a 6-2 count in the SBC Tournament.
While the Sun Belt’s champion doesn’t yet get an NCAA Tournament bid, the highly-regarded UL program was invited once again.
Once there, the Cajuns defeated San Diego State 6-0, No. 6 Fullerton 1-0 and No. 13 Oklahoma State by another 1-0 score to set up a showdown Sunday.
In the first game against No. 18 Oregon, Mitchell felt a troubling twinge in her arm just one-third of an inning into the action. She tried to continue but had to head for the dugout in what became a 9-2 Oregon victory.
Then, with the season on the line, Mitchell took the pitching circle for the deciding game.
The inspired Cajuns exploded for five runs in the bottom of the first and went on to a 6-4 victory to advance to the WCWS in Oklahoma City for the first time under Lotief.
Tiffany Grayson ripped two home runs and Jill Robertson had another, while Mitchell gritted her way through seven innings of 10-hit ball.
UL faced powerful Texas in the WCWS opener, and freshman sensation Danyele Gomez greeted Texas ace Cat Osterman with a towering two-run home run. But the Longhorns rallied against the ailing Mitchell for a 3-2 win.
Eventual champion UCLA followed with a 5-1 victory to knock the Cajuns out of the hunt, but the team’s youth promised a return soon.
While Becky McMurtry (.395, 14 homers, 51 RBIs) was a senior, Gomez is back after a school-record 20 home runs and 62 RBIs, along with Mitchell, Robertson, Grayson and many others.
Lotief added five new promising signees in the fall to further strengthen the future of the school’s program.
Cajuns bustle up to finish strong
Coach Rickey Bustle faced a challenge in his second year guiding Ragin’ Cajun football.
Against a rugged early lineup featuring impressive teams like bowl-bound Minnesota, Houston and North Texas, the Cajuns stumbled to a 0-7 record.
That included a 45-42 homecoming defeat by UL Monroe, the Indians’ only victory of 2003, before the Cajuns bounced back.
Three wins in four weeks brought UL to the win total of Bustle’s first year, but defeating Middle Tennessee in the finale on the road would achieve a runner-up spot in the Sun Belt Conference and a sign of progress.
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Bruce Brown
bbrown@theadvertiser.com
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