NCAA regional a homecoming of sorts for 1 Mainer

LINCOLN, Neb. – There was a lot of speculation and some wishes about where in the nation the Maine softball team would be sent for its NCAA regional.

Black Bear outfielders Dana Grimm and Molly McKinney are from Michigan, so there was some hope the team would be in the Ann Arbor regional there. Amy Kuhl is from Phoenix, so Maine was hoping to go to Tucson, Ariz. Pitchers Candace Jaegge (California) and Jenna Merchant (Utah) wouldn’t have minded a trip to Los Angeles or Stanford, Calif.

But one member of the UMaine group was hoping for Nebraska – athletic media relations and marketing assistant Julia Eberhart, whose family lives on the South Dakota-Minnesota border.

Eberhart’s parents Randy and Joyce Meyer, sister Elizabeth and brother Bryon drove six hours from Gary, S.D., to Lincoln Tuesday. They spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Eberhart and left Thursday morning.

“I told [the team] when we knew we were going,” Eberhart said. “I was joking, hey, I’m pulling for Lincoln. I figured I’d jinx it telling my mother we might go to Lincoln.”

Eberhart last saw her family during Christmas, but hadn’t seen them for a year-and-a-half before then.

UMaine senior associate athletic director Blake James has a Lincoln connection. He worked at the University of Nebraska for several years.

Nebraska support strong

The Nebraska softball boosters club set up a tailgating area in the Bowlin Stadium parking lot here Thursday. At one point during the day a woman approached club president JoAnne Owens-Nauslar with a check for $500.

“She said, ‘I believe in these kids,”‘ Owens-Nauslar said Friday. “She told us, ‘You’re doing the right things for the right reasons.”‘

That’s the kind of support any program would love to have. And the boosters club, called the On Deck Circle, provides it in the form of about $15-20,000 per year.

The club was started by Owens-Nauslar, who is known as Dr. Jo (she has a doctorate in education). She’s a Nebraska graduate and former Cornhuskers assistant women’s basketball coach who now works as a motivational speaker for Walk 4 Life, a Chicago-based company that makes pedometers.

The On Deck Circle has more than 250 members and a 13-person board of directors.

Owens-Nauslar was on the search committee that recommended the hiring of current Nebraska softball coach Rhonda Revelle, now in her 12th season. The club started that year.

So what kind of advice would Owens-Nauslar offer for smaller programs like Maine’s?

“You remind people, there are going to be tough times, but these kids need to see people there,” Owens-Nauslar said. “We have to do this. These kids are academically gifted and athletically gifted. And the fans have to have fun. The kids will feel you’re having fun and it builds from there. There was a time when we had 200 in the stands, now we put 1,500 in here.”

Iowa error forgotten

Iowa’s 2-0 win over UMaine may have stung as the Black Bears ended their season, but it will likely provide a huge lift for the Hawkeyes, who lost their first round game against Mississippi State because of an error in the bottom of the eighth inning.

Relief pitcher Ali Arnold overthrew a ball to first, which allowed a run to score and gave the Bulldogs a 2-1 win.

Iowa came into the NCAA regional having lost three straight, including two to Illinois and another to Ohio State in the first round of the Big Ten tournament.

“It’s been like that for a couple weeks for us,” coach Gayle Blevins said. “It wasn’t just yesterday. So it was just trying to get out of that mindset, trying to get back more to an aggressive, determined mindset and that’s what we’ve been trying to work on.”

Maine was the second team to be eliminated from the Lincoln regional. Lehigh fell to Florida Atlantic 3-0 in Thursday’s late game.