Despite another split doubleheader, the vibe in the dugout following Syracuse’s series against Louisville was much different from last weekend.

Sparse talk was replaced with hearty chatter while the players swept the dugout clean and prepared for the team dinner. A feeling of lost opportunity was replaced with a sense of accomplishment.

For senior Jamie Kelling, it was hard to deny that the sole victory over the Cardinals (40-6, 15-3) could prove to be the defining one of her four years.

‘That’s a huge win for this program,’ Kelling said, ‘I mean, this is a ranked team, this is great for us.’

The Orange (25-14 overall, 11-5 Big East) defeated its first ranked team in three years Sunday as it knocked off No. 17 Louisville 10-5 on Sunday. The Cardinals bounced back in the second game and won, 8-2. The split came a day after a two-game sweep of Providence.

Syracuse head coach Leigh Ross also felt as if the victory severely outweighed the loss Saturday, even though she would have loved to sweep the second-ranked team in the Big East.

‘I’m never happy losing, but I feel like getting a split with Louisville is huge for this program,’ Ross said. ‘I’m satisfied with that.’

The Syracuse skipper attributed the squad’s victory to a different attitude it brought into Sunday’s series – an attitude that reverberated from the mound to the batters box and throughout the field.

‘We came out and we knew that we had to be aggressive,’ Ross said. ‘I talked to the girls before the game, and I told them that we prepared enough and to just go out there and give it your all, and they really pounced on it.’

No inning better epitomized the confidence that the Orange had built up than the bottom of the third inning, as SU tallied six runs on Louisville ace Kristen Wadwell (33-6). For the game, Rachel Helman led the Orange with four RBI’s on 3-for-3 hitting.

‘I’ve seen that a lot this year,’ Kelling said. ‘I mean, we get real hot, we have had a lot of those games where it has just clicked in that one frame.’

On the mound, Jenna Caira pitched another top-notch performance, as the standout freshman pitched all but one-third of an inning, actually returning to the game after leaving before the sixth inning. She amassed seven strikeouts.

A half an hour later, even though the Orange would eventually succumb to a settled down Wadwell, the aggressive attitude was still apparent.

Nothing exemplified this more than senior captain and catcher Amy Kelley, who wanted to return to the game despite a broken nose suffered during a Wadwell wild pitch that left Kelley face down in the dirt, quivering in pain.

‘She wanted to go back in, but that nose is over to the side, so she is going to the doctor right now,’ Ross said.

In the second game the Orange saw a different side of the Cardinals, more specifically Wadwell, as the three-time Big East pitcher of the year settled down and produced an 8-2 victory for the leaders of the Big East.

Her counterpart, Caira, felt as if the tales of the two games came down to the differences in Wadwell’s outings.

‘In the first game, their pitcher was getting rattled,’ Caira said. ‘But in the second game she had a little more confidence in her, she was hitting her spots, and to be honest, that was probably the difference.’

With the home stretch approaching for the Orange, the team can only hope to keep replicating performances like that of Sunday.

Ross is just trying to get the message out to her squad that more nights like this are entirely possible, and that winning the Big East isn’t out of the question for the fourth-place Orange.

‘What I’m really trying to get across to them is that we can do this,’ Ross said. ‘If you could compete with that team then automatically your confidence gets built up. Fifteen hits off of that pitcher has to help your confidence in some way.’

aolivero@syr.edu

Published on April 19, 2009 at 12:00 pm