MOM UPSIDE DOWN IS WOW AND OTHER NAPKIN NOTES FROM NINER NATION
It was mother’s day across the Beach nation on Sunday, but with just one accredited mother at work you got the feeling that this wasn’t going be just champagne, crepes and carnations for softball coach Kim Sowder.
With baseball coached by Troy Buckley, track by Andy Sythe and everybody else with their seasons wrapped up, Kim’s softball sweethearts of swat got the featured team treatment, driving for the postseason riding the elephants of Cal Fullerton. Kim’s day started early at her Yorba Linda estate, first preparing a BBQ honey-do list for husband Shawn and sons Zachary and Jacob, then packing her bag for the Forty-Niner Softball Complex.
While Saturday’s show was marked by ESPN TV cameras and a big crowd of little people—youth softball teams with names like the Sugar Babies, Girl Scouts making signs in a frenzy, and of course the dreaded and iron-lunged Titan softball dads—by Sunday the 1991 Beach All-American would be celebrating her 20-something Mother’s Day on a diamond. Kim still has that uneasy feeling that there is work to be done even though Long Beach’s RPI of 30-something would seem to be a shoe-in for at least an NCAA at-large bid. Catching and passing Pacific for the outright Big West bid would be tough but job one on Mother’s Day would be to push Fullerton well into third place. They did.
The 49ers (35-15, 13-5 Big West) won two of three from the Titans (21-22, 11-7 Big West) and are one game behind league-leading Pacific with one weekend to play. The Beach girls wrap up their season with a three-game series at cellar-dweller UC Riverside while the Tigers finish with a three-game series at usually contentious Cal Poly. In any event, it would be shocking to not see both LB and UOP in a bracket when the postseason pairings are revealed.
Oh yes, the balance of Sunday Senior Day went very nicely thanks to a mixture of Sowder’s gritty student athletes. Sophomore Nalani St. Germain cracked the two-out game-winning single to score classmate Bree Stephan. The win, as it has been 21 times this year, went to fab freshman Erin Jones-Wesley (now 21-5) but seniors Liz Javier, Christina Schallig and Michelle Turner added to the weekend work. On Sunday, with her mom in the stands, the unknown ‘Niner Andrea Littleworth showed up…
Recruited as much because she was an honor roll student at Esperanza HS, Andrea was a member of the National Honor Society with an excellent GPA in a tough major, biology-physiology. Her senior day softball work was to nurse a walk from Titan ace Ari Cervantes (her fourth free pass in eight official plate appearances this season). Without a single hit this season, she now leads the team in on-base percentage (.571) and maybe, just maybe, will make the other team’s scouting report.
REST OF THE DUST—The lingering highlight for softball will be the home-run robbing over the fence catch by Hannah De Gaetano that checked into ESPN’s Top Ten Plays list… I owe you some good baseball news but, well, if you can’t say something nice… ASU was feeling chipper after kicking sand on the Beach boys but their big NCAA court date is coming up May 16th… Does that mean no post-season? Hummm, not quite, they could still play on while appealing the certain-to-come sanctions… This weekend, meanwhile, features the Bags’ OC live tour with three games in Fullerton, a break for Riverside at Blair, then the final series at spruced up Anteater ball park…
Long Beach State track and field athlete Cameron Gillett, who died in a car accident in Long Beach last Friday, will be buried this Friday at 10:00am at Zoe Christian Fellowship Church in Whittier. Gillett, a junior economics major at LBSU was one of the 49ers’ top performers in the long jump and in the 400-meters and won the long jump at the recent Big West Challenge…
Big West champs again and ranked No. 36, Long Beach State will play No. 27 Pepperdine Saturday at 9:00am in the opening round of the NCAA tennis tournament at Palo Alto while No. 2 Stanford, the top seed in the tournament, will host Illinois-Chicago… The LB-Pepp match is a rematch of a March 18 regular-season meeting between the teams. Back then the ‘Niners swept the doubles point but dropped four singles matches in a tough 4-3 defeat loss to the Waves. This time, Klaudia Malenovska will be on the sideline with a blown ACL… Big names on campus last week were Academic All-District Selection Brennan Metzger who hit .556 at Arizona State, including a double and triple; Softballer Bree Stephan hit .600 in the three games and scored that winning run in the bottom of the seventh Sunday; and Nicholas Armstrong won the BWC men’s decathlon with 7,409 points. Last add Bag business, the 49er faithful will bring out the butane and blankets for a home contest against UCLA Tuesday but the only path to the postseason will be winning all three of the next series, at CSUF, home against UCR and on the road at UCI… Wherever you go, enjoy the ride.