Boston College Athletics
2021 Softball Preview: Arms Race
January 30, 2021 | Softball, #ForBoston Files
BC is back for 2021 with a loaded pitching staff ready to compete
It's easy to rubber stamp a one-size-fits-all storyline to last March's COVID-19 outbreak. The global pandemic, limited in scope up until that moment, exposed coaches and athletes to its initial struggle by canceling the schedule in one swoop. Games, practices, events and meetings ended in the blink of an eye and wiped out every league and every discipline at once.Â
The sudden end robbed winter sports of their typical crescendo, but it created a more complex discussion around spring. Sports like softball were picking up steam, and Boston College was almost two dozen games into its 2020 season when it ended. The season wasn't complete, but it really hadn't started either.Â
That feeling lingered through the offseason and set a different kind of tone for 2021 for the Eagles. A year after a season finished with one win out of a three-game series against Georgia Tech, BC is back to prove this year isn't a case of unfinished business, but it's also not a complete rewrite of what could have been or didn't happen.
"We were at Logan Airport and got called back to campus last year," BC head coach Amy Kvilhaug said. "The most disappointing part of that was that as a team, we were getting better every weekend. We were hitting our stride, and we had to kind of take the punches that we were given and figure out how to move forward. We're starting over, which at least as a staff, we were able to establish the kind of culture we wanted to set. Everybody's a little more comfortable because they know me a little bit more, and they know our standards and expectations. It's not necessarily from square one (this year)."
That doesn't make it easier to forget the way last season ended after the Eagles finished late February with the one win against the Yellow Jackets. They were riding the crest of an extra inning, eight-inning loss to No. 18 South Carolina and returned to Georgia after earning a win in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge earlier in the month.Â
They went 3-2 in a five-game barnstorming tour of the University of Georgia and posted two shutouts, one of which was a run-rule win over Eastern Illinois. Both losses during the trip came at the hands of the No. 14 Bulldogs, but the Eagles posted seven hits in their first meeting. They were never really out of either game, though the second game against Georgia was a one-hit shutout.
It sent BC into its conference opener with confidence, and it responded from a 6-0 loss to Georgia Tech with an inverted, 6-0 win. Both games went scoreless through the first three innings before offenses wrote a different tune, a turnaround sparked by a rallying emergency by pitcher Susannah Anderson.
"She was going to have a pretty good year," Kvilhaug said. "And in softball, you can really do well when you have an ace for a pitcher. We were beat pretty good out of the gate against Georgia Tech, and she came over to me and said she was awful. She asked for the second game and said it wouldn't be the same, and we went out there and beat them, 6-0. Then Sunday was a close game that could have gone either way."
Anderson ultimately finished the season with an 8-8 record, but her 1.80 ERA sparkled on the pitching stripe. She threw eight complete games in 17 appearances and 14 starts and posted five shutouts. Her 85.2 innings were 62 percent of the team's 137 innings completed, and her 3.5:1 strikeouts-to-walks ratio accounted for 70 percent of all K's.Â
The pace built on her freshman year numbers when she won six games and threw 174 innings over 49 appearances. Her sophomore year numbers placed her eighth in the ACC and 88th in the country in ERA and second and sixth in the conference and nation in shutouts while posting top five and top 65 numbers, respectively, in strikeouts.
"She is a very, very solid, very talented pitcher," Kvilhaug said. "She has the ability, but the thing that goes along with that is her competitiveness. That goes a long way, and she's big and strong, and can throw pretty hard. She matches up with the best of the ACC, and I think her confidence is just continuing to grow. She had a little bit of a bumpy season during her freshman year, and while I wasn't here to witness it, that can be hard on a (pitcher's) confidence. So we got back to the basics of getting her back to feeling comfortable physically. Once she started winning, her confidence really picked up."
Anderson gives BC an everyday pitcher, but Kvilhaug's goal was to set a tone with pitching depth and interchangeable parts. Both CC Cook and Peyton Schnackenberg started games for the Eagles last season, and all three returned for this year after the NCAA ruled student-athletes would retain the 2020 year's eligibility without penalty.
"If you look at numbers from the year before to last year, they're better for CC," Kvilhaug said. "Her walk numbers went down, her strikeout numbers went up, and she was pretty solid. That sort of recreated CC a little bit, and she's a little bit more finesse. There's a lot of changing speeds, and that's how we want to get a lot of hitters (out). She can throw three different speeds, and her pitch-to-pitch might have a six-to-nine miles per hour velocity change.
"That adds to Peyton, who we want to see turn from less of a bullpen pitcher into more of a competitor," she added. "We want her to boil down to one pitch at a time, and that's where we're going to continue to get better. She is one of those pitchers that loves to clean things up fundamentally, and she's a pitcher that loves the X's and O's, the technical aspect of the skill. So we cleaned up some things in her fundamentals, and she had an astronomical amount of strikeouts in the eight games that we played in the fall. That's the biggest kind of difference moving on from last year to this year, and that's the confidence that we have under our feet a little bit."
Boston College launches its 2021 season against Jacksonville University on Friday, February 12 at 5 p.m. It's part of a four-game series across three days and precedes a doubleheader on Saturday against North Florida. The Eagles wrap up the opening road trip on Sunday against the Ospreys before starting ACC on February 17.
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The sudden end robbed winter sports of their typical crescendo, but it created a more complex discussion around spring. Sports like softball were picking up steam, and Boston College was almost two dozen games into its 2020 season when it ended. The season wasn't complete, but it really hadn't started either.Â
That feeling lingered through the offseason and set a different kind of tone for 2021 for the Eagles. A year after a season finished with one win out of a three-game series against Georgia Tech, BC is back to prove this year isn't a case of unfinished business, but it's also not a complete rewrite of what could have been or didn't happen.
"We were at Logan Airport and got called back to campus last year," BC head coach Amy Kvilhaug said. "The most disappointing part of that was that as a team, we were getting better every weekend. We were hitting our stride, and we had to kind of take the punches that we were given and figure out how to move forward. We're starting over, which at least as a staff, we were able to establish the kind of culture we wanted to set. Everybody's a little more comfortable because they know me a little bit more, and they know our standards and expectations. It's not necessarily from square one (this year)."
That doesn't make it easier to forget the way last season ended after the Eagles finished late February with the one win against the Yellow Jackets. They were riding the crest of an extra inning, eight-inning loss to No. 18 South Carolina and returned to Georgia after earning a win in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge earlier in the month.Â
They went 3-2 in a five-game barnstorming tour of the University of Georgia and posted two shutouts, one of which was a run-rule win over Eastern Illinois. Both losses during the trip came at the hands of the No. 14 Bulldogs, but the Eagles posted seven hits in their first meeting. They were never really out of either game, though the second game against Georgia was a one-hit shutout.
It sent BC into its conference opener with confidence, and it responded from a 6-0 loss to Georgia Tech with an inverted, 6-0 win. Both games went scoreless through the first three innings before offenses wrote a different tune, a turnaround sparked by a rallying emergency by pitcher Susannah Anderson.
"She was going to have a pretty good year," Kvilhaug said. "And in softball, you can really do well when you have an ace for a pitcher. We were beat pretty good out of the gate against Georgia Tech, and she came over to me and said she was awful. She asked for the second game and said it wouldn't be the same, and we went out there and beat them, 6-0. Then Sunday was a close game that could have gone either way."
Anderson ultimately finished the season with an 8-8 record, but her 1.80 ERA sparkled on the pitching stripe. She threw eight complete games in 17 appearances and 14 starts and posted five shutouts. Her 85.2 innings were 62 percent of the team's 137 innings completed, and her 3.5:1 strikeouts-to-walks ratio accounted for 70 percent of all K's.Â
The pace built on her freshman year numbers when she won six games and threw 174 innings over 49 appearances. Her sophomore year numbers placed her eighth in the ACC and 88th in the country in ERA and second and sixth in the conference and nation in shutouts while posting top five and top 65 numbers, respectively, in strikeouts.
"She is a very, very solid, very talented pitcher," Kvilhaug said. "She has the ability, but the thing that goes along with that is her competitiveness. That goes a long way, and she's big and strong, and can throw pretty hard. She matches up with the best of the ACC, and I think her confidence is just continuing to grow. She had a little bit of a bumpy season during her freshman year, and while I wasn't here to witness it, that can be hard on a (pitcher's) confidence. So we got back to the basics of getting her back to feeling comfortable physically. Once she started winning, her confidence really picked up."
Anderson gives BC an everyday pitcher, but Kvilhaug's goal was to set a tone with pitching depth and interchangeable parts. Both CC Cook and Peyton Schnackenberg started games for the Eagles last season, and all three returned for this year after the NCAA ruled student-athletes would retain the 2020 year's eligibility without penalty.
"If you look at numbers from the year before to last year, they're better for CC," Kvilhaug said. "Her walk numbers went down, her strikeout numbers went up, and she was pretty solid. That sort of recreated CC a little bit, and she's a little bit more finesse. There's a lot of changing speeds, and that's how we want to get a lot of hitters (out). She can throw three different speeds, and her pitch-to-pitch might have a six-to-nine miles per hour velocity change.
"That adds to Peyton, who we want to see turn from less of a bullpen pitcher into more of a competitor," she added. "We want her to boil down to one pitch at a time, and that's where we're going to continue to get better. She is one of those pitchers that loves to clean things up fundamentally, and she's a pitcher that loves the X's and O's, the technical aspect of the skill. So we cleaned up some things in her fundamentals, and she had an astronomical amount of strikeouts in the eight games that we played in the fall. That's the biggest kind of difference moving on from last year to this year, and that's the confidence that we have under our feet a little bit."
Boston College launches its 2021 season against Jacksonville University on Friday, February 12 at 5 p.m. It's part of a four-game series across three days and precedes a doubleheader on Saturday against North Florida. The Eagles wrap up the opening road trip on Sunday against the Ospreys before starting ACC on February 17.
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