Before Syracuse even stepped on the field Saturday, it was having a bad weekend. The team had to take three different planes to get to Tampa, Fla., at 1:30 a.m. after its first flight was canceled.

And the problems didn’t stop there. When SU did start playing, head coach Leigh Ross said the 80-degree weather presented another challenge for her team. And on the field, her team was swept by South Florida as a result of sloppy defense and a quiet weekend at the plate.

‘We didn’t get any breaks, nothing went our way and we had a lot of obstacles,’ Ross said. ‘You know how you just have those bad days? It just carried over into two days.’

For a Syracuse team off to its best start in program history, the three-game sweep was its first losing weekend of the season. SU (24-8, 3-3 Big East) fell behind early in all three games after errors led to big USF first innings. The Orange offense couldn’t carry the team either, as it managed just four runs in the three games.

After a 4-0 loss Sunday, Ross told her players to stick together. She is writing it off as a bad weekend and believes the record start is a better reflection of her team right now. Ross said the team is keeping the same attitude and hopes it will lead to success again.

The confidence that has powered SU all season was missing last weekend, though. The Orange made eight errors over the weekend, including five in a disastrous first inning Sunday. The five errors tied a single-game program record and led to four unearned runs in the loss.

Junior pitcher Jenna Caira, who had two errors in that inning, said the team was too uptight to start the game. After the first error, the players felt extra pressure to avoid making the next mistake.

‘If you start thinking that you don’t want to make the error,’ Caira said, ‘you’re going to become a magnet, and the ball’s going to come to you.’

The ball found Caira early on. In the bottom of the first inning, USF’s leadoff hitter laid down a bunt on the first pitch. Caira fielded the ball and threw it off the runner’s back. The ball skipped into the outfield, allowing her to advance to second base.

The next hitter hit a groundball to Caira and her throw pulled first baseman Kelly Saco off the bag. After the first few errors, Ross called time to calm her team down, but the damage was done. The first two errors opened the floodgates and the Bulls capitalized on three more errors in the inning to score four runs.

Caira said it came down to making errors on routine plays.

‘USF put the ball in play,’ Caira said. ‘They caused us to make the plays and forced us to make errors at times.’

Ross thinks the team got nervous after the first few errors. After a crisp warm-up before the game, Ross was surprised by the defensive struggles.

‘It was like, ‘What? Again?” Ross said. ‘When that started happening, started unraveling right from the get-go, it was, ‘Oh boy, this isn’t what we expected.”

The sweep was an abrupt end to an eight-game winning streak in which SU dominated its opponents.

Junior catcher Lacey Kohl said the losses give SU more to work on moving forward. She said the team is better than its weekend performance showed. After the humbling weekend, Kohl said Ross reminded her team that it can’t relax after its early-season success.

‘Just more of like a wake-up call for us,’ Kohl said. ‘Just knowing, like, ‘Hey, we still have work to do.”

Ross thinks her team is still the same team that started the season. Now SU has to learn how to handle the added pressure that comes with success.

After winning the Big East tournament last year and earning a national ranking earlier this season, SU’s conference opponents are gunning for the Orange. And the team struggled with that pressure all last weekend.

‘It will be more about dealing with the target on our back and trying to overcome that feeling of everybody could be coming after us,’ Ross said. ‘Still playing our game despite that pressure.’

rjgery@syr.edu

Published on April 5, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Ryne: rjgery@syr.edu