With half the season completed, and half to go, Taylor University softball is at a tipping point.
The Trojans currently sit with a record of 19-15 (11-9), good enough for fourth in the Crossroads League.
Fighting, clawing and scratching through one of the toughest conferences in the NAIA, Taylor has spent the last month dueling conference opponents, going 8-4 in their last ten games while outscoring opponents 70-48 during that stretch.
The CL stands as one of the most competitive conferences in the NAIA - rarely will you see one team sweep another in a season series.
Assistant coach Natalie McGuire was a former player at Huntington University but now reps the purple and gray after being recruited by head coach Doug Gower. She knows the ins and outs of this conference like few others do.
“One of the really cool things about the Crossroads League is that it’s so competitive,” McGuire said. “We say that all the time, it doesn’t matter who you’re playing …and that’s one of the beautiful things and one of the difficult things.”
Currently, No. 7 Marian, No. 16 Indiana Wesleyan and Spring Arbor sit in front of Taylor in the CL but have not been able to survive the conference unscathed.
Saint Francis, Bethel, Mount Vernon Nazarene and Huntington (all teams in the bottom five of the conference) have taken games off of the top three teams.
Fortunately for Taylor, they play to their strengths to overcome many of the challenges they face.
Selfless and team-oriented, they excel at the small things, focusing on Coach Gower’s mentality of doing the fundamentals well, and letting everything else come along.
Heading into the second half of the year, they are looking to focus on consistency. While Taylor’s offense is one of their greatest strengths, they can be streaky, with a hot-and-cold tendency.
Senior outfielder Aleyah Rastetter is one of the two Trojan seniors in her final season and knows how to break down the team like few others.
“Our offense is really good,” Rastetter said. “We really have people who can hit the ball, and I think that’s definitely a strength for us, (but) on the flipside of that, is kind of pulling everything together all at once…I think that we’ll start to be able to gel more and be able to pull those things together.”
Rastetter serves as the team’s leadoff hitter and is having an excellent season, batting .342 while leading the team in hits with 39, but she is not the only powerhouse on the roster.
Taylor has seven batters with an average over .300, with one hitting over .400: sophomore Kaylee Larkin.
Larkin isn’t just one of the best hitters on the team, she’s one of the top athletes in the NAIA. Nationally, Larkin ranks top 50 in batting average (.447), top five in walks (24), and top 10 in slugging (.570), on-base percentage (.914) and home runs (9).
Larkin elaborated on the team’s mentality in one of the toughest stretches of the year, explaining that the Trojans take each game at a time, but don’t lose sight of taking down the conference’s top dogs.
“We like to take it pitch by pitch,” Larkin said. “We are preparing for Marian and IWU; personally, I’d like to at least take a couple games from each of them and the team would say the same thing, but we just take it one pitch, one game at a time.”
Thanks to Taylor’s tough early season schedule, many of their final games before the conference tournament will be at home. The Trojans have only played eight games at Gudakunst Field, but haven’t been fazed by the tough road schedule and are sitting with an 11-8 record on the road and a 4-1 record at neutral sites heading into a nice stretch of eight home games in late April.
Taylor’s conference play continues at home in a doubleheader against Grace (IN) on April 16th at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., looking to take the lead in their season series against the Lancers after splitting their first two games in March.
