Last Saturday, the Union University softball team (29-23, 14-16) clinched their first conference tournament spot since 2015 in a win over Christian Brothers, and they are set to travel to Pensacola, Florida, for their first contest against Alabama Huntsville (37-13, 21-8) at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday.
The tournament will be held in a double elimination format, with the winners of the first round being placed in a winner’s bracket and the losers set up in a daunting series of five must-win games to win the title.
Union enters the tournament as the seventh seed, and fortunately for them, they will play the only team in the top three seeds they have a win against in the regular season.
“If you go back and look at any of the teams we haven’t beat, some of them we should have won or they were just truly close and it didn’t go our way,” head coach MacKenzie Sher said. “But definitely with UAH the confidence level going into that would be higher.”
The Lady Bulldogs are currently ranked 10th in the South Region, and the top eight teams make it into the national tournament, but Union could secure an automatic bid with a conference tournament win this weekend.
The 2019 iteration of the Lady Bulldogs is easily the best any student on campus can remember and will have a claim as Union’s best in the NCAA Division II era should it win a postseason game. The 2015 team (Union’s only other Gulf South Tournament team) finished with 31 wins but only put up one run in two postseason losses before being eliminated.
Sher, the first-year head coach just five years removed from her playing days at Southern Mississippi, deserves a lot of the credit for Union’s unexpectedly quick rebuild.
“[Sher] just has so much energy since she was playing a few years ago,” said senior first baseman Haley Barnette. “There was a big culture change when she came in. We just really focus on the little things… It’s really about getting to the little things to try to get to the bigger goals.”
The tournament will run from Thursday to Sunday, and the entire tournament schedule and streaming options can be viewed here.
