On Sunday, the softball team (10-17, 3-6 Ivy) bounced back to win the third game of their three-game series against Dartmouth (9-12, 5-4 Ivy).
After they were held scoreless in the first two games of the series, the Bears broke out a 12-9 victory in game three. Trailing 9-8 entering the final inning, Bruno was down to their final out, but Vanessa Alexander ’25 reached base on an error by Dartmouth’s shortstop, scoring right fielder Leah Carey ’25 to tie the game.
In the very next at-bat, first baseman Jasmine Hsiao ’26 hit a clutch three-run homer to center, giving Brown a lead that they would not relinquish. In an email to The Herald, Head Coach Kate Wheeler described Hsiao’s big home run as a “game changer”.
Pitcher Alexis Guevara ’25 shut down Dartmouth in the bottom half of the seventh, earning her second complete game of the weekend. Hsiao’s timely dinger gave the Bears the momentum they needed to close out the win, Guevara wrote.
“When a player like Jasmine steps up like that, it’s huge and it motivates all of us to finish strong,” Guevara explained. “I always focus on one pitch at a time, which is how I keep the moment from getting too big for me. But after that major at-bat, I needed to finish the game.”
“Alexis was on a mission to finish that back-and-forth game,” Wheeler wrote in a message to The Herald. “We could tell by her demeanor in the circle that she was going right at those hitters.”
Brown’s offense struggled in the first two games of the series, getting shut out for the fourth and fifth times this season.
“Our first game against Dartmouth was a pitcher’s duel,” Guevara wrote. “Our defense played well and kept (their) offense down. We had a good game plan to keep their hitters off balance, but in the end, they were able to get enough runs to pull off the win.”
Brown’s twelve runs against Dartmouth in game three were the most the Bears have scored in a single game all season. Third baseman Dara English ’24, left fielder Lily Berlinger ’26 and Hsiao each tallied a trio of hits in the series finale, marking the first time since 2019 that three Bears have recorded three hits each in the same game.
Despite the team’s initial struggles, Wheeler “walked away from the series really proud of the hunger our team had to make sure we walked away with the win,” she wrote. “It was a tremendous growing moment for our program to show that type of grit.”
This was the third conference series this season in which the Bears pulled off a third-game victory after losing the first two games.
“We’ve done a good job all year of making adjustments at the plate the second time we face a pitcher,” Wheeler wrote. In the “first three series we’ve shown that we are maturing as a program in the sense (that) we aren’t rolling over to anyone even after losing the first two games of a series.”
Guevara attributed these third-game victories to the team’s loose style of play, which “helps us approach each game without any added pressure. We work hard during the week, so we can trust our training on the weekend. We play hard but have fun at the same time.”
According to Wheeler, Brown’s offense will be a point of focus moving forward. “We aren’t scoring enough,” she said. “Of course, we need to clean up our defense, but more so we need to make adjustments quicker on offense to find ways to get ourselves on the board more early in a series.”
On Tuesday, the Bears took both games of a doubleheader against the University of Rhode Island, putting them on a three-game win streak that gives them plenty of momentum heading into this coming weekend’s in-conference series on the road against Cornell.
“Our team is playing loose and having fun together and sometimes that’s more important than anything we can work on in practice leading up to our trip to Ithaca this weekend,” Wheeler wrote. “Our bats have really come alive, scoring 21 runs over the last three games, and that is crucial for us to compete with a very good offensive Cornell team.”
The series against Cornell begins on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. All games will be available to stream on ESPN+.
Gus Bailey is a senior staff writer covering the sports beat. He is a sophomore studying applied math-economics. His interests include data analytics, marketing, social media and of course, sports.
