Carey-Leigh Thomas was questioning herself at the plate. Anytime she missed a pitch, she kept wondering what she was doing wrong.

The Syracuse freshman let go of all doubt and put a charge into an outside pitch, sending it over the right-field wall for a grand slam and Orange lead in the first inning.

‘When I hit that ball, I had nothing going on in my head at the time,’ Thomas said. ‘I had nothing going through my head. I feel like the key to hitting good is thinking nothing at the time and just see the ball, hit the ball.’

Thomas’ early bases-clearing blast is just what Syracuse needed. After struggling to produce early runs, the Orange finally took the lead over South Florida and never looked back, taking the rubber game of its three-game series with a 7-0 win in front of 323 fans on a sun drenched afternoon. In the two previous games, SU could only put runs up in the late innings against the Bulls, leading to a doubleheader split.

On senior day though, the Orange set the tone right away.

‘You always want to jump on a pitcher soon,’ senior Lacey Kohl said. ‘Especially a good pitching staff like USF has so getting ahead and being aggressive early is very big because you always want to be the first one to score.’

In the bottom of the first, Syracuse spent little time getting its strong offensive performance underway. Shirley Daniels singled, and then Veronica Grant and Stephanie Watts showed patience by both drawing walks to load the bases.

USF pitcher Sam Greiner almost wiggled out of the jam by retiring the next two batters, but she couldn’t avoid Thomas.

Thomas took two change-ups and then fouled off a tough inside pitch. After that pitch, the third baseman inched a little closer to the plate, and extended her hands on an outside fastball.

‘I had a feeling she was going to throw me outside,’ Thomas said. ‘I just saw it and I took it.’

And then sent it out of the park. The early inning pile-on only continued for the Orange.

In the bottom of the second, Daniels hit her second home run of the weekend series. The two-run shot was like a bullet off the bat. It bounced off the protective netting in right field and deflected back into the playing field.

Ahead by six runs after just two innings, it was more than enough support for SU pitcher Jenna Caira, who went on to a pitch her second no-hitter of the season. But earlier in the weekend, the Orange wasn’t giving much support to any of its pitching staff.

In the Orange’s sole win Saturday, SU didn’t score until the fifth inning with a pair of runs. And in the backend of the doubleheader couldn’t figure out South Florida’s pitching until the seventh inning, when Watts blasted a three-run homer that knotted the game at three and forced extra innings.

SU went on to lose the game after leaving eight runners on base.

‘Early on in that game we could’ve have scored some more runs,’ Ross said of SU’s loss. ‘We had some opportunities, we didn’t take care of it.’

Ross told the team before Sunday’s contest about how they always talked about being ‘locked in’ at the plate. It’s even the motto on SU softball posters for this season.

But it’s one thing to talk about it, and it’s another thing to actually follow through on.

The Orange did both Sunday.

‘We didn’t just say it, we actually did it. You could feel it. It was a different approach the entire game,’ Ross said. ‘And every kid had that mode… for some reason today they pulled it all together and that was everybody’s mindset was just being locked in on every pitch.’

dgproppe@syr.edu

Published on May 6, 2012 at 12:00 pm