SCC Finally Has a Streak to Savor

The home dugout at the Southern California College baseball field is a much happier place lately because the Vanguards aren’t struggling anymore.

SCC has won six consecutive games, a significant feat for a team that had won only four games in the first six weeks of the season. The Vanguards suffered through losing streaks of six, six, five and four games before finding a way to win.

“It’s nice to finally see them having fun,” SCC Coach Kevin Kasper said. “It’s hard to keep telling them that we are out here to have fun when they are getting beat all the time.”

The fun started March 19 in the second game of a doubleheader with Lewis & Clark (Ore.). After losing the first game, 8-3, the Vanguards were tied, 4-4, in the final inning. Designated hitter Mike Grasse came to the plate with two outs--and hit his first home run of the season.

Then in the second game of a doubleheader with Concordia Saturday, the Vanguards rallied from a 6-1 deficit in the final two innings. After scoring three in the sixth (it was a seven-inning game), the Vanguards scored three in the seventh for a 7-6 victory. Shortstop Steve Dolias had the key hit in the seventh, driving in a run with a triple (his first of the season) and scoring the tying run.

“Different guys are stepping up,” Kasper said, “which they are beginning to realize is what it takes.”

Actually, it’s not only the guys who are stepping up lately. Ila Borders, who has been moved to the bullpen this season, earned her first victory since March 30, 1995, Monday in the second game of a doubleheader with Hawaii Pacific.

Borders entered the game with one out in the seventh to pitch to a left-hander. She got that batter to fly out and the next one to ground out. When the Vanguards scored in the bottom of the inning, Borders (1-1) had a 3-2 victory.

“I told her, ‘This is an important out,’ ” Kasper said. “And she got the out and then got the next guy. It worked the way my pitching coach and I envisioned the bullpen would work.”

Kasper, the Vanguards’ first-year coach, said his players weren’t handling such situations earlier in the season. It’s a young team--two starters are seniors and one is a junior--and the inexperience was showing. SCC lost six games by one run and couldn’t seem to catch a break.

That has changed during the winning streak: five of the six victories have been by one run. “It’s the small things,” Kasper said. “Sometimes there’s not much difference between winning and losing.”

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Add baseball: After beating Biola, 4-0, Tuesday on a five-hit shutout by Kevin Withers, SCC is 10-22 and 5-10 in the GSAC. With nine conference games remaining, the Vanguards are in sixth place, 2 1/2 games behind Biola (18-8, 6-6), which is in fourth place and would receive the final playoff spot if the season ended today.

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Last season, SCC’s softball team struggled early and then went 7-1 during a spring break tournament in Florida. The team won its third consecutive Golden State Athletic Conference title and went on to finish third at the NAIA national tournament.

Last week, the Vanguards, struggling early again this season, took a trip to Mobile, Ala., for a tournament and a few nonconference games and . . . went 2-7.

“We didn’t play well at all,” SCC Coach Bekki Turner said.

The Vanguards were hit hard by graduation, losing five starters, and several players have left school or quit the team this year. “There have been a lot of things that have hurt the spirit of this team,” Turner said. “But we’ve done an outstanding job of staying together. That’s what is keeping us going.”

Tuesday, in SCC’s first games since the trip, the Vanguards pounded last-place Biola, 8-0 and 23-0, before the Biola coach pulled his players from the field with one out in the bottom of the fourth.

SCC is 12-13-2, 3-1 in the conference and tied with Azusa Pacific (18-7, 3-1) for first place.

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Left on-deck: Chapman softball player Jessamine Maiben tied the NCAA Division III record for consecutive games with a hit last week but missed a chance to break the record.

After hitting safely in 30 consecutive games, Maiben made an out in her first three at-bats against St. Thomas (Minn.) in the Rebel Spring Games in Orlando. Chapman took a 7-0 lead in the top of the fifth, and because St. Thomas didn’t score in the bottom of the inning, the game ended because of the mercy rule.

Maiben would have been the first batter in the sixth inning. Maiben, who is batting .563 for the season, has started a new streak. She hit safely in the next four games.

Chapman, 17-3 and top-ranked in Division III, went 8-1 on the trip to Florida, losing only to No. 9 Rowan (N.J.), 8-5. The Panthers (17-3) beat No. 2 Trenton State (N.J.), 2-1, and No. 3 Allegheny (Pa.), 3-2.

Notes

Jack Bauerle, Chapman’s head trainer, was told Wednesday that the Piranhas, Anaheim’s Arena Football League franchise, are not inviting him to training camp. Bauerle, who played for Servite in the early 1980s, was invited to two tryouts with the team. . . . Concordia women’s basketball player Angela Sather was a third-team NAIA All-American selection. Sather, a junior from Tucson, Ariz., was the Golden State Athletic Conference player of the year. Sather also was named an All-American Scholar-Athlete by the NAIA. She has a 3.55 grade-point average in exercise/sport science. . . . Christopher Kindreich, a senior outfielder on the Concordia baseball team, has set the NAIA career record for being hit by pitches. In three seasons with the Eagles, Kindreich has been struck 43 times, surpassing the previous mark of 39.