The University of Wisconsin softball team (25-19 overall, 9-8 Big Ten) has had a great three-game run.
They beat the University of Nebraska for the first time in program history and placed a cherry on top by making it a three-game sweep. Over the span, the Badgers won by a combined margin of 28-7, and are looking fearsome heading into their last regular season series against Northwestern University.
But the story that makes this stretch of dominance more than just a late-season Badger outburst, has been senior Kelsey Jenkins.
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Over these three games, Jenkins hit a ludicrous .800, eight hits in ten at-bats, with eight RBI’s and a homer — that means she notched almost a quarter of all the Badgers hits in the series. She accounted for exactly a quarter of their runs batted in. This is excluding the six runs she scored herself.
If you thought Jenkins wouldn’t be a demon on the base paths, you’d be sorely mistaken. She had a stolen base in each game.
You would think she would have drawn more than just three base-on-balls, considering it shouldn’t have taken too long for Nebraska’s pitchers to decide pitching to 2001 Ichiro Suzuki is just a bad idea. Nevertheless, she was only walked three times, notably one more time than the number of at-bats she failed to reach base.
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Generally listing off statistics is not the way to go when it comes to writing a readable article, but when the stats look like these, it’s forgivable.
Entering Friday’s opening match-up against the Cornhuskers, Jenkins was batting .385. She came out on the other side with a shining batting average of .411. A 26-point swing is not too bad for three games.
This performance unsurprisingly led to her selection as the Big Ten Player of the Week.