With the SUNYAC tournament just around the corner, the Geneseo softball team’s strategy is to stay the course and hope its regular season success translates into the postseason. “Everything we did week one, we’re doing right now,” head coach David Sylvester said. “We find that’s the best way to approach that. There’s nothing new being thrown at us, there’s no panic taking place, there’s no sense of urgency and it’s another game that we’re going to play.”
Although they hold the No. 4 seed, the Knights are only two games out of first place. Sylvester is confident in his team’s ability to win.
“If you take the team we have right now compared to the team we had five weeks ago, I think this is a better team that’s stepping on the field,” Sylvester said. “They know themselves – we really didn’t have a sense of who we were as a team. I think they truly have molded into a team that understands what [it has] to do to win.”
In order to succeed, Sylvester is counting on the whole team to step up, which he does not anticipate being a problem.
“At the beginning of the season, we had three or four girls that were carrying us,” Sylvester said. “I can honestly say we are eight or nine deep now. If you look at the batting averages, they have all gone up.”
In the SUNYAC tournament, teams play just one game per day. This will be a change from the regular season, where teams play doubleheaders against every opponent. The tournament is double-elimination, which bodes well for the Knights who have performed extraordinarily well in the first games of doubleheaders throughout the regular season.
Expectations are certainly high going forward given Geneseo’s success in the SUNYACs in previous years. Last year, Geneseo went all the way to the finals, where they lost in extra innings to SUNY Cortland. Still, the players are not worried.
“We came into the end of the season and we didn’t really have to win all the games,” Sylvester said. “We were in the playoffs as of last week and we went into last weekend and went 3-1. There’s really no one who’s tense right now. We’re taking it as if it’s just another game.”
The Knights play SUNY Brockport on Thursday May 1 at SUNY Oneonta in the first round. The last time the teams met was April 19, when the Knights and the Golden Eagles split a doubleheader. Geneseo won the first game 3-2, while Brockport took the second 9-1 in six innings.