Eastern Illinois softball lost its first chance at the Ohio Valley Conference tournament championship 5-0 to Lindenwood. In the winner take all game, EIU gained the lead in the fourth inning and held it going into the seventh and final inning.
Senior pitcher Karlie McKenzie, last year’s OVC player of the tournament, stepped in the circle. The score was 5-2 and the count was full with two outs and a runner on first base.
McKenzie said she was not thinking about anything.
“If you think too much, you’ll overthink it and then push a pitch and that leads to not good things,” McKenzie said.
The pitch was thrown, and freshman infielder Karter Skillman swung and missed for strike three.
“I just turned around and saw Chloe [Wamboldt] get so fired up, and it just made it all worth it for me,” McKenzie said.
With that out, EIU became back-to-back OVC tournament champions beating Lindenwood 5-2 at OSF Healthcare Field at the Louisville Sports Sluggers Complex in Peoria on Saturday.
McKenzie also won the OVC player of the tournament this year after pitching in all four games EIU played in.
Unlike McKenzie, a lot of the players on Eastern’s roster are new this year and didn’t know how to react including junior infielder Chloe Wamboldt.
“The last strikeout was; it was just a surreal experience, Wamboldt said. “I just threw my glove and just, I don’t know, just wanted to celebrate with all my teammates.”
She said that she blacked out in the moment and that she has won JUCO tournaments before, but it was a different feeling at the Division I level.
Another new player to EIU this year is senior infielder Lizzie Stiverson. This was her first and last OVC tournament, and she said she couldn’t be more thankful to do it with this team.
“I couldn’t have made a better decision. This is where I was supposed to be,” Stiverson said. “This is how my story was supposed to end.”
In the first game Eastern Illinois could not start anything. It finished the game with only three hits compared to the 11 Lindenwood had.
Co-head coach Kristi Paulson said that the message to the team between games was that they have been in this situation before.
Paulson was specifically talking about two instances. Once this year when EIU played Lindenwood in its first home game of the season.
Eastern went down six runs early and came back to win the game in extra innings.
The second time was last year when EIU lost the first game of the OVC tournament championship round to Southern Illinois Edwardsville.
Same as last year, Eastern was able to pull out the second game.
In the second game Lindenwood struck first with one run in the first inning. EIU answered right back in the second with two runs.
Lindenwood tied it in the third inning, but Eastern scored another two in the fourth. One more run in the sixth inning for the Panthers ended the scoring for the day.
This is the third OVC tournament championship in four years for the Panthers.
But, for junior catcher Sophia Olman this is the third time she has been in the conference championship game but only the second time winning it and with the Paulsons.
After the game Olman was the first one to hug both coaches.
“They’re my second parents. And I just love them and their support for everybody, especially me,” Olman said. “And they’ve been there since day one for me. And I’m just so happy to share this with them.”
Tomorrow, the Panthers will find out where they will be heading for the NCAA tournament regionals. Last year they went to Texas but did not win a game.
“I wanted more than anything for this group of players to experience playing at an NCAA regional,” Paulson said. “But not only do we want to just go play there, we want to make some noise.”
