COLUMBUS — The Mississippi University for Women baseball team continued its impressive start to conference play with a doubleheader split against first-place Spalding University on Wednesday, taking Game 1 in a 3-0 shutout win.
“It’s a huge win,” W head coach Scott Mularz said. “That puts us in a good position within the conference, especially against a quality opponent like Spalding. Hopefully, we can gain some momentum from that going into the rest of our schedule.”
The Owls improved to 10-12 overall and 7-3 in the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. They got off to a good start in the second game of the day with a five-run first inning, including a grand-slam from catcher Avery Benson, but Spalding’s bats woke up to put 18 runs past the Owls over the rest of the day.
The first game shutout came in large part because of the arm and bat of Landon Clark. His eight strikeouts over 7.2 innings helped frustrate the visitors and set up reliever Connor Reilly for the save opportunity.
“Landon put the team on his back and our guys fed off of that,” Mularz said. “ He controlled the zone and kept them off balance, he frustrated them, and Landon has been doing that ever since he got here. He also came up with a big hit to get us started.”
Clark’s double in the third inning got teammate Swayze Rikard home to break the deadlock. It was the first of three runs on the day, with Matthew Windham and Zach Johnson joining him in the RBI column.
It was a slow start for the Owls offense this season, but they’ve built off of some historic performances to start their SLIAC campaign. The Wednesday results make it three or more runs in eight out of 10 conference games.
“They’ve done a good job of putting in the work and buying into the process of what we’re trying to do,” Mularz said of the improved production at the plate. “We faced some good arms early, and our approach wasn’t good. Our coaches have done a good job dialing it back in to where we can handle the quality arms.”
Johnson, recently named to the NCAA Division III Team of the Week, saw his 19-game hitting run come to a close, but did provide the third run of the day with a sacrifice fly ball to deep center in the seventh inning.
Johnson will have the chance to start a new hitting streak this weekend as he and the Owls travel to Eureka College for a three-game series. It’s the 11th road trip the team has taken this season, and they’ll have at least four more, but Mularz has been able to handle the heavy travel and loaded schedule by focusing his group on what they can control.
“We haven’t gotten into them yet,” he said of Eureka. “We’ll do our scouting reports today, but we focus on the faceless opponent. If we do what we’re supposed to do then it doesn’t matter who we play, and our guys have really bought into that.”
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