UNG Softball punches ticket to National Championships

With a strong crowd presence, dominant pitching and some timely hits, the Lincoln Memorial University softball team had made themselves feel quite at home in Dahlonega on Friday, all but shutting down the Nighthawks as the designated home team in UNG’s own stadium.
And then suddenly, with the season on the line, the Nighthawks came through once again, with a three-run eighth inning of a winner-take-all Game 3 to claim the NCAA Division II Southeast Super Regional and punch the team’s ticket to Denver for the National Championships.
“I’m extremely proud of this group,” head coach Mike Davenport said following the game. “They’ve come so far since last August, September when we put this squad together on the field for the very first time. They showed a ton of resiliency today to continue to battle and never quit.”
The team is now set to make its second-straight trip to the National Championships as one of just eight teams left in the tournament, after having gone to Denver for the 2021 National Championship as well. The trip will be the Nighthawk’s seventh appearance in the NCAA National Championship.
After winning Game One with ease on Thursday, finishing early with a mercy-rule shortened game that saw the Nighthawks on top 9-1, it looked like an easy sweep might be in order. However, it became quite the opposite as LMU took control on Day 2, winning the first game 3-1 to force a Game 3 in the Best-of-Three series. Despite UNG hosting the Super Regional, it was the Railsplitters who became the aggressors, dominating the Nighthawks in the same fashion UNG is known for doing to others, behind strong pitching, clean defense and clutch hitting. For the first 14 innings of the day, nearly all of the momentum resided with UNG’s opponents.
“LMU hit us in the mouth early today and it was hard,” Davenport said. “They had us struggling and frustrated the entire first game and then in Game 2, it just took a couple swings and that was the difference of the ballgame. Our pitchers kept us in it.”
Those couple of swings couldn’t have come at a better time for UNG. After coming up big on defense in the bottom of the seventh to force extra innings with the winning run in scoring position, it was unclear how much longer the Nighthawks could hold on. A quiet day at the plate needed to be reversed quickly if North Georgia’s season was to continue. Davenport said that the key to breaking through when the team is struggling offensively is sticking to the plan.
“I think the biggest thing is you can’t get over-aggressive,” he said. “You have to stay with your approach and in the first game I think we were trying too hard. You could tell from the frustration, but that’s a credit to their pitcher who did a tremendous job. But you just have to simplify things and find holes and we finally found a hole in the last inning there.”
The Nighthawks did just that. With two outs in the eighth, Hannah Forehand stepped up to the plate and delivered, knocking a two-strike pitch into left field, just past the outstretched glove of the LMU left fielder looking to make an inning-ending running grab. Instead, the ball trickled into the corner, allowing Madison Simmons to come around from first to score the go-ahead run.
“It was a little bit of relief and then I think that probably freed up Jacie [Michael] to take an aggressive swing after that,” Davenport said of the go-ahead run’s impact on the game. “That was the biggest difference, having the lead, because everybody plays a little bit more relaxed with the lead. That was a huge at bat by Hannah to get us that first score.”
With North Georgia now up 2-1, having its first lead in either game on Friday, the Nighthawks looked to put LMU away for good. One swing later, Jacie Michael inserted the dagger, sending a pitch out of the park for a two-run blast that shattered the Railsplitters’ National Championship dreams and a car’s back window.
“Jacie’s made it a little bit farther out of reach,” he said. “You’re never out of reach with a team like LMU, but a one-run lead compared to a three-run lead is a big, big difference. She’d been taking good swings all day….She got that one, all of it for sure.”
From there, Jordan Warzynski shut it down from the circle, striking out LMU’s final batter to start a Mile-High Celebration on the field.
UNG enters the NCAA Division II National Championship seeded No. 7 and will take on No. 2 Adelphi University on Thursday in the opening round, with first pitch set for 6 p.m.