No. 3 Texas Lutheran Completes SCAC Title Sweep for Eighth Straight SCAC Title

IRVING, Texas -- No. 3 Texas Lutheran completed the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) title sweep Sunday, beating Trinity, 5-1, to win their eighth consecutive SCAC Tournament crown.

The win marks the Bulldogs fifth victory over Trinity in two weeks, their 21st straight victory, and improved their SCAC Tournament record to 23-1 to secure their eighth straight season of winning both the SCAC regular season and tournament crowns.

Five Bulldogs were named to the All-Tournament team: outfielders Madison Johnson and Kelly Jurden, second baseman Casey Martin, and pitchers Ashlyn Strother and Sydney Ouellette.

Texas Lutheran scored in their final four trips to the plate and held off the Tigers loading the bases in the second and stranding runners on second and third in the fifth.

After Trinity loaded the bases with two outs, Ashlyn Strother (Seabrook/Clear Falls) left them stranded with one of her seven strikeouts of the afternoon.

The Bulldogs got on the board first as a Kelly Jurden (Brenham/Brenham) shot through the left side scored Chassety Raines (Spring/Klein Collins) in the third inning. In the fourth, Bailey Hudgeons (Dripping Springs/Dripping Springs) collected her SCAC-leading 30th RBI of the season - driving in Casey Martin (Pearland/Pearland) to bring the score to 2-0.

After a Trinity run in the top of the fifth, TLU put two more runs across in the bottom of the inning on three hits. Following a leadoff double from Raines, Kelly Jurden once again drove her in with a shot through the left side for her second RBI of the game. A Casey Martin single would score Saturday's hero Madison Johnson (Round Rock/Round Rock) to extend the Bulldogs lead to 4-1.

In the bottom of the sixth, Sarah Metzer (Sugar Land/Dulles), who had the hottest bat of the tournament, would add an insurance run as Linzee Leal (Corpus Christy/Mary Carroll) would sprint all the way from second on a ground ball to the Trinity shortstop as the game arrived at its final score of 5-1.

Strother went 4.2 innings, allowing six hits to the Trinity offense to go with just one unearned run, no walks, and seven strikeouts to pick up the winning decision. With the win, Strother moves to 21-0 on the season to match the TLU single season wins record set by Maitlin Raycroft in 2017. Sydney Ouellette (Corpus Christi/Gregory-Portland) closed for the Bulldogs, retiring all seven batters she faced in 2.1 innings pitched to collect her third save of the season - moving into the top 10 in the country in the category in the process.

With the SCAC Championship victory, Texas Lutheran earned the conference's automatic qualifier bid to the 2022 NCAA Tournament. The Bulldogs will enjoy a week off as they await their regional selections, set to be announced Monday, May 9 at 12 PM CST via web stream on ncaa.com. The 2022 Division-III NCAA Softball Regionals will take place Friday, May 13-Sunday, May 15 or Thursday, May 12-Saturday, May 14 (if a team has a no-Sunday play policy in place). All streaming and live stats links will be found on tlubulldogs.com.

For more information on Texas Lutheran softball, follow the Bulldogs on Twitter and Instagram (@TLUsoftball) and as always you can find updates on all Texas Lutheran athletics on tlubulldogs.com and all official TLU social media channels (@tluathletics on Twitter, @tlubulldogs on Instagram and Facebook, and @tlu_athletics on TikTok).