The way the Wichita State softball team struggled defensively Saturday night in its doubleheader served as a reminder that the team still has a lot of work to do before the regular season begins.

Thanks to its offense, WSU won the first game against Cowley County 10-4. But coach Kristi Bredbenner was more concerned about the errors her team made.

The Shockers made four errors in the first game. And despite committing three of those four errors in the first inning, WSU came out of the inning down only 1-0. The mistakes came as a surprise to the Shockers, who are confident in their infield defensive strength.

“That is part of our strongest areas, our infield, and when the errors were committed, everyone was like ‘what the heck,’” senior outfielder Danika Miller said.

“I think we focused on not making the mistake versus making the play and having the confidence to make the play,” Bredbenner said.

Bredbenner held a 10-minute team meeting when both games concluded to discuss what needed to be worked on.

“I’m not a person that is not going to sit there and lecture them about the things that they did wrong. Obviously we know what they did and we talked about how the focus next week was improving the things we struggled with,” Bredbenner said.

WSU lost to Western Oklahoma 7-2 in the second game. The runs were harder to come by against a harder throwing pitcher.

“I thought we did not do a good job of jumping on the pitches we should have and chasing some of the bad ones,” Bredbenner said.

The Shockers hurt themselves with some base-running mistakes. Miller was tagged out running to third base when Bredbenner initially signaled for her to hold up at second.

“You take away some of those mistakes and we give ourselves a little bit of momentum. We killed our rallies every time in those innings by making complete mental mistakes,” she said.

The silver lining for Bredbenner was the power her hitters displayed when they did make hits.

“We hit the ball a lot harder than we did last week. We’re putting the ball in play and we didn’t have as many pop-ups,” she said.

WSU will get another chance to clean the defense up when they host Butler County on Wednesday.

“Our big thing is that we want to get better and work on the things we know we have to get better at,” Bredbenner said.