For a program in just its fifth year of existence, reaching the final game of a postseason tournament seems like a pretty major accomplishment. For the Lamar Cardinals, reaching the final game of the inaugural NISC (NIT-style) tournament last season was just that – a major accomplishment, but one that ended in incredible disappointment.
After the tournament organizers made the decision to end the final game due to rain, after just a minutes-long delay, the game reverted back to the last completed inning, erasing the Cardinals’ lead and giving the championship to the Liberty Flames. It’s an outcome that Cardinals head coach Holly Bruder didn’t agree with, but says her players have to build off of.
“There’s not much you can do about that, moving forward,” Bruder said. “You’ve got to control the controllables and play your game and I didn’t have any control over that and they didn’t, either… I tell my girls, ‘listen, I am proud of the way that we finished [in the NISC]. If we played that way all season, we would be talking NCAA, not NISC. Let’s go from where we left off.”
Despite the controversial finish, Bruder said she took many positives from her team’s 2017 season. “This is how I explain our 2017 season to an outsider,” she said. “I think we took an average season and made it spectacular. We have eight one-run ballgames in February alone, against some big schools like Texas A&M, Kansas, Tulsa. To be in those games was awesome, and I think we missed some good opportunities on those. Getting an opportunity to host [an NISC regional]was awesome. Spectacular.”
Lamar sponsored softball for a handful of years in the mid-to-late 1970s and briefly in the 1980s before doing away with the program in 1987. The program was Bruder’s to restart when she was hired in 2011 and given two years to build the program from scratch.
“It is a big difference from taking over a program to building one,” Bruder said. “When you take over somebody else’s program, you can blame some other coach for recruiting, etc. But these are [my players]. I’ve handpicked them. There is one word that I don’t say a lot, and it’s hard to use it without championships, but I’m proud of the players that we have and how they do things right, on and off the field.”
With the loss of their starting battery to graduation following last season, Bruder’s club will look to replace workhorse pitcher Ciara Luna as well as starting backstop Brynn Baca. Neither will leave easy shoes to fill.
“The way that [Baca] called a game, how she knew each pitcher and what to say to them, you can’t teach that,” Bruder said of her two-time all-conference catcher. “And Luna, she came in as a junior college transfer and became the conference’s Newcomer of the Year, our highest accolade to date. The composure, the attitude that she brought to the table… how do you top that?”
With a young roster full of underclassmen, Bruder expects some unheralded names to contribute highly to the Cardinals in 2018. “I think our young players need to contribute right now,” she said. “That’s putting a lot of pressure on them, but we know what our stat leaders are going to do, what a Brittany Rodriguez is going to do. I think this is the fastest team that we’ve had and I think that speed will help this lineup go a bit further than they have in the past.”
Lamar opens the 2018 season in Gulf Shores, Alabama on February 9 against Georgia Tech.
