Bulldogs Host UAB In 2003 Home Finale
State Begins Final Week Of Regular Season; Travels To Florida This Weekend
STARKVILLE, Miss. -- The Mississippi State softball team (31-24) will play its final home game of the 2003 regular season Tuesday evening when the Bulldogs lace up to face visiting UAB (23-23) in a twilight contest at 6 p.m at the Mississippi State Softball Field.
The Bulldogs are fresh off a series loss in its final home conference set of the season, dropping the bookends of a three-game set with visiting Arkansas on Friday and Saturday. UAB rolls into Starkville on the heels of a doubleheader sweep of Stephen F. Austin on Tuesday afternoon in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Tuesday's meeting will mark the second time this season that the squads have faced each other, with MSU taking a 2-0 decision from the Blazers on February 12 in Birmingham.
In the earlier meeting, State scraped together a run in each of the second and seventh innings and held the one through five hitters for UAB to a paltry 0-for-15 tally. MSU currently leads the all-time series 2-0. The Bulldogs took a 4-1 decision from the Blazers in the last Starkville meeting on March 22, 2000.
UAB will bring a very balanced ballclub into town that has thrived on the performances of a pair of senior pitchers. Kerri Foster (11-11, 1.77 ERA) has five shutouts to her credit this season and possesses a strikeout-to-walk ratio of nearly 3-to-1, while Kelli Thompson (10-7, 2.02) has accounted for 43 percent of the Blazers' victories and will ride a personal three-game winning streak into Tuesday's contest. Foster was UAB's pitcher of record in the Blazers' loss to MSU in February.
UAB is led, offensively, by sophomore Sara Christophel who has tallied a .298 (39-for-131) batting clip to go along with 11 extra-base hits (1 HR) and 11 RBI. Sophomore Kris Lara is second on the squad with a .289 (37-for-128) batting average and 11 RBI. Thompson paces the Blazers in the home run and RBI column with four and 20, respetively. Christophel is one half of a set of twin sisters (Carrie) on the UAB squad and both are the daughters of former Mississippi State wide receivers coach, Rick Christophel, an assistant under football head coach Jackie Sherrill from 1991 to 1994. The elder Christophel is now a senior associate athletic director at UAB.
Following Tuesday's meeting with UAB, Mississippi State will head to Gainesville, Fla., this weekend for a three-game series with Florida. The Bulldogs and Gators will open their series with a 1 p.m. Saturday afternoon doubleheader and close out the set in Sunday afternoon's series finale at 1 p.m.