A Whole New World: Softball to embark on adventure that is the Sun Belt Championships

Staff Reports

Everything prior to Wednesday, May 11 means very little for the Texas State softball program. Every loss. Every win. Every weekly honor. Every postseason award. They were all storylines embedded within the Bobcats’ 2022 regular season.

But, at 4 p.m. CT on Wednesday, the only thing that matters is surviving and advancing in the 2022 Sun Belt Conference Softball Championships. The journey for the third-seeded Bobcats towards its first conference tournament championship since the 2018 season begins when Texas State (35-17, 19-8) faces the sixth-seeded App State Mountaineers (29-24, 10-15) on ESPN+.

The two teams met earlier this season in San Marcos, Texas, where the Mountaineers claimed the three-game series with victories in game two (3-2) and three (4-1) after the Bobcats won the opening contest (5-0).

For the second consecutive conference tournament, Jessica Mullins (25-11) will have all the eyes in the stands looking at her when the Bobcats take the field. And for the right reasons. The sophomore right-hander was recently named the Sun Belt’s Pitcher of the Year after being named the conference’s weekly pitcher of the week on three occasions, leading the league in wins (25) and tying for the lead in strikeouts (234).

Mullins will have the guidance of a senior catcher behind the dish in Caitlyn Rogers, who also picked up a weekly conference honor earlier this season and was selected to the league’s all-conference first team along with the Bobcats’ ace pitcher and starting shortstop Hannah Earls. Rogers has helped Mullins to a conference-low 1.84 ERA, one of six student-athletes in the league to have thrown out double digits would-be base stealers and one of three Bobcat softball student-athletes to hit .300-or-better (.311) on the season.

While Mullins and Rogers bring experience to Jaguar Field on the campus of the University of South Alabama, there’s one Texas State softball student-athlete eager to make an impact: Ciara Trahan.

Earlier in the week, Trahan, a Sante Fe High School product, was named the Sun Belt’s Player of the Week, the Sun Belt Freshman of the Year and to the All-Sun Belt First Team. Against conference foes, Trahan hit a team-leading .400 (34-85) to go along with a team-high .457 on-base percentage.

The last time the Sun Belt Conference Softball Championship was held in Mobile, Ala., — 2017 — Texas State made it to the conference championship game against top-seeded Louisiana after knocking off Troy, South Alabama and Georgia State in consecutive days. Since joining the league prior to the 2014 softball season, the Bobcats have won at least one postseason conference tournament game in each of the last six seasons, excluding the COVID-19 shortened 2020 season.

Texas State will enter this year’s conference tournament with the nation’s longest active winning streak at 15 games. It marks the second consecutive season the Bobcats have posted a double-digit winning streak after winning 18 during the 2021 season. The 2022 season also marks the third time under head coach Ricci Woodard that the Bobcats have posted double-digit winning streaks in back-to-back seasons: 2001-02, 2002-03 and 2021-22.