By Gabe Katz

The Tennessee Wesleyan Softball team started their 2024 season with high spirits and even higher expectations. In their last two seasons the Bulldogs made an appearance at the NAIA National Tournament twice, having gone to the NAIA College World Series in 2022. The trips in 2022 and 2023 seem to have cemented the Bulldogs’ place near the top of the Appalachian Athletic Conference softball scene and set the standard for the program as National Tournament contenders. Hoping to attend their fourth NAIA Softball National Tournament since 2013, the Bulldogs came into their season poised for major success.

During the team’s preseason, they were “in the gym a lot” said Sophomore In-fielder Kaley Bradley.

One of the team’s more seasoned players and leaders, Junior In-fielder, Mackenzie Baldwin feels like this preseason was much “more locked in” compared to the preseason experiences in her previous two years in Athens.

 As the season has progressed, the team has “developed a chemistry” that they hope to be the final piece that will secure a ring for the program.

While the preseason was more stringent and there is a sense of camaraderie in the team, Baldwin feels like the team can do so much more. The season “has been rough compared to the last two years I’ve been here”. She cited the coaching staff’s lack of “confidence in us” as something that the team hopes to address in the latter stretch of the season.

Up to this point in the 2024 campaign, the Bulldogs boast a record of twenty wins and eleven losses, seventeen of these wins and seven losses coming in conference play. With 4 games remaining in the regular season, the team is preparing to make another deep run into the postseason. Two road trips with games at Pikeville University and Truett-McConnell University will conclude the regular season. Truett-McConnell sits one place above the Bulldogs in the AAC standings, making that midweek series very important as the Bulldogs only mindset now is “looking for first”.

Edited by Jack Shaw
Interview by Jonathan Powers and Corbin Shaw
Audio Editing by Jonathan Powers
Photos Courtesy of Adolfo Nicolas