In her postgame press conference following No. 11 Texas A&M softball’s 4-0 win over No. 11 Mississippi State — and the Aggies’ first home Southeastern Conference shutout since 2024 — head coach Trisha Ford referenced something unexpected: a meme.
The indelible image of a miner hacking his way through rubble only to be inches away from diamonds before turning away is something the coach often cites to her pitchers in reference to trusting the process for the payoff.
For Ford, that payoff came in the sixth inning, when sophomore right-handed pitcher Sydney Lessentine shook her coach off for the first time, and then promptly secured the out.
“That was a really big growth moment for me,” Ford said. “So when she came back to the dugout, and I was like, ‘Oh, I like that. … That’s what I want to see out of you. I want you to own your process and your pitching.’”
Lessentine found those diamonds with a gem of a performance, pitching a shutout with only three hits allowed and two strikeouts. The performance was one from a player that Ford said “any coach would love to have a pitcher like that.”
“You have to have some nerves of steel, we’ll call it,” Ford said. “ … You’ve got the ball every single time, all eyes are on you, there’s a circle drawn around you, so you gotta be a dog in there.”
That level of pitching only came from one of the teams out there, as Mississippi State junior left-handed pitcher Alyssa Faircloth walked nine batters before being replaced in the sixth inning.
After struggling to find the zone in the first frame, the wheels came off the Faircloth wagon in the second. Three walks and two hit by pitches in the inning resulted in three straight bases-loaded RBIs without needing to swing the bat for the Aggies.
The bottom of the second came with what surely gave the 12th Man in attendance a nasty taste of deja vu: The tarp was unfurled during a weather delay. But luckily after last week’s Olsen Field debacle, this pause in play was only about 25 minutes.
“I think the weather delay was a nice reset to get my mind right to go back out there and just bench it,” Lessentine said.
Where the Aggie bats were struggling, though, the gloves were excelling. Sophomore shortstop KK Dement and senior second baseman Tallen Edwards turned two double plays in the first two innings to erase runners from the basepaths.
“Tallen and KK have great communication,” Ford said. “ … We threw dropballs in those situations, and I thought [Lessentine] did a good job of executing that pitch. … We got a good middle infield, we don’t have to strike everybody out.”
Down 3-0 and once Faircloth walked her ninth of the day in the bottom of the sixth, Mississippi State head coach Samantha Ricketts had finally seen enough, turning to Game 1’s reliever, junior LHP Delainey Everett.
After going 0-1 against Everett in Friday’s contest, junior designated player Mya Perez said after the fame that her team’s confidence wasn’t shaken, saying she has “no worry in her head about her.” During her first and only at-bat against the southpaw, Perez backed up her talk, chopping one up the middle to put runners on the corners. The insurance run was secured on the next turn at bat, where senior first baseman Micaela Wark plated junior pinch runner Hailey Golden with a sac fly.
“If we see somebody Day 2, it shouldn’t last very long,” Ford said. “And I did feel like today, when she came in, our hitters were like, ‘OK, we’ve seen her, let’s get after her.’ I can sense the confidence.”
The Aggies will look to win their ninth in a row and sweep the Bulldogs on Sunday, April 19, with first pitch set for 1 p.m.
