Bulldogs Head To Palm Springs For Early Season Test
May 25, 2016 | Softball
2005 Palm Springs Classic
STARKVILLE, Miss. - Coming off its fourth consecutive home tournament championship with a 3-1 record last weekend in Starkville, the Mississippi State softball team will head to the West coast this weekend to get a gauge of its early season progress as the Bulldogs compete in the 24-team Palm Springs Classic at the Big League Dreams Sports Park in Cathedral City, Calif.
Over the course of five games in the suburb of Palm Springs, State (9-3) will battle a trio of nationally ranked opponents, including a pair of high octane west coast squads on opening day. MState will open up its portion of round-robin play on Friday afternoon against top ranked Cal-Berkeley (5-0) at 3 p.m. PST before taking on Cal State-Fullerton (2-2) in the nightcap at 8 p.m. Saturday's schedule will pit the Bulldogs against 20th-ranked Pacific (6-1) at 10:30 a.m. and Utah (5-5) at 3 p.m.
The Bulldogs will close out its portion of tournament play on Sunday at 9:30 a.m. against tournament host and 18th-ranked Oregon State (6-6). Mississippi State will be one of two Southeastern Conference teams at the high-powered gala, joining SEC Eastern division foe Tennessee in the desert for the weekend.
This will be our toughest competition until we get to the SEC Tournament, said Mississippi State head coach Jay Miller. There are some great teams out there and most of them are ranked and ranked very highly. It will give us a good judge of where we are at and where we want to go. It will also give us a good lead in to SEC play.
The Bulldogs are coming off a rain-shortened weekend that saw them take top honors at the MSU-hosted Bulldog Classic with a 3-1 record. With injuries and illness abundant, State rode the shoulders of a trio of pitchers on the weekend, getting a pair of shutouts (one combined) from sophomore righthander Kelli Miller on her way to all-tournament team honors.
However, with the jockeying of positions on the diamond, the Maroon and White also saw the emergence of some hitters, including sophomore catcher Blair Geddings who paced the hosts on the weekend with a .455 hitting clip and senior Tanelda McDonald, who cruised to tournament MVP accolades after leading MSU in RBI (5) while tallying a .417 mark at the plate.
The big thing we are struggling with right now is trying to settle in on a lineup because we have kids that have moved around position-wise a lot, Miller said. It's a matter of trying to find out what combination is going to work the best and, day-to-day, who is going to be healthy and able to play. That has been a little frustrating but it is something you're going to have to deal with.
I think the kids have done a good job in terms of stepping up and I feel really good about where we are at on the mound and I feel good about where we are at the plate. We haven't established that defensive consistency that we'd like, but we're continuing to work on that.
Friday afternoon matchup with the No. 1 Golden Bears will mark just the third meeting since the 1999 season between the two clubs, but will revisit a close game turned in by the squads at last season's NCAA Region 5 Tournament in Lincoln, Neb. In that contest, Cal got an RBI single with two outs in the bottom of the sixth to complete a two-run comeback victory that, eventually, helped propel them to the national championship game with a 2-1 triumph over the Bulldogs.
State has faced a No. 1 team just one time in the history of its program, but prevailed with a 7-1 defeat of top-ranked Arizona that effectively snapped a 32-game unbeaten streak by the Wildcats. The Bulldogs are 36-99 all-time against nationally ranked teams, but are 18-35 against such foes since Miller took over the reigns of the softball program prior to the 2003 campaign.
Fullerton has won both of its meetings with the Bulldogs in the history of the series, including a 3-0 win at the 2003 Fiesta Bowl Tournament in the last matchup. The Bulldogs will meet Pacific for the first time in school history, while the Bulldogs have a five-game history with Utah that, although closely contested, has the Maroon and White seeing just one victory * an 11-3 rout in the 2000 NCAA Region 1 Tournament in Seattle, Wash.
Like Fullerton, Mississippi State has dropped both of its series meetings with Oregon State. The Bulldogs and Beavers last met at the 2001 Texas A&M-Corpus Christi-hosted Islander Invitational with OSU taking an extra-inning affair by a 1-0 count, before taking a 3-0 decision the next day.
