Her hitting was her nemesis last year, but she still got to play good defense for us. She's gotten stronger, though, and she's been hitting in the No. 3 spot during the scrimmages. I'm hoping that she'll be a surprise with her bat.

As long as we're playing defense behind her, we're going to do OK. Erica was good with her rhythm, but we didn't make any mistakes behind her. If we continue to do this, we're going to surprise some people.

We didn't hit as well, but then again the weather changed a lot from our 3 p.m. game to our 7:30 p.m. game. We still executed well by putting the bunt down and moving runners over. So that's getting better. And our defense played well behind Erica. So hopefully those will carry over.

After Tuesday night, we had a meeting. I told them that there's no excuse for our pitcher getting 15 strikeouts and us not being able to get six outs without giving up some runs. We had been practicing kind of sluggish, and that carries over. But we bounced back Thursday and started hitting the ball. It was a good mental victory.

She's going to be vital to us. She kept us in games last year, and she should have had more wins. But we just couldn't give it to her. Our problem was that we couldn't put the nail in the coffin because we couldn't score enough runs.

We're going to be a team that's going to surprise some people. Our hitting is coming around. We worked hard in the off-season to get strong and have faster bat speed. And so far, it looks like we have more pop in the bat this year.