Courtesy of FAMU Athletics
The Florida And Mechanical University Lady Rattlers fell 5-4 to the Savannah State Tigers in Sunday’s final game of a three-game series.
The close defeat followed Saturday's series, where the Lady Rattlers split games, then lost in the doubleheader against the Lady Tigers.The defending MEAC champions got off to a slow start in Sunday’s game, allowing three runs off of two hits in the third inning.
Junior infielder, Jessica Nathan, from Archer, FL, scored the first run for the Lady Rattlers in the third inning. She thinks that the team did not get going as quickly as they should have.
"We didn’t make the adjustments as we needed to in order to score the runs we needed to," Nathan said. “We didn’t take advantage of the runners on base.”
The Lady Rattlers went on to score on a run by the senior infielder, Alyssa Weaver, from Oldsmar, FL, in the fourth inning before going into another scoring drought in the fifth and sixth inning.
“We hit well. We didn’t capitalize on runners or scoring position. Our time with hitting really wasn’t there when we needed it," Weaver said. “They capitalized on timely hitting,and that’s how they beat us.”
The Lady Rattlers were able to get within one run of the Lady Tigers, after scoring two runs in the seventh inning. They were not able to overcome the defense of the Lady Tigers, and fell 2-1 in the three-game series.
Assistant Coach Lori Goodart promised next time the team will not be stagnant when it comes to hitting, and believes the team did an excellent job of preventing runs.
Next time we’ll know a little bit better what to do to get runs across,”Goodart said. “Today, we did a great job of coming back and keeping Savannah State’s hitters under control. We had quite a few hits. We’re still going to work on the timely hit. We capitalized on some walks and errors they made. If we’re not up every weekend, games like this will happen,"
Next up the Lady Rattlers have a makeup game against Florida State University April 1st at 6 p.m.