Rainbow Wahine softball: Heen nabs player of the week
Callee Heen’s bat was smoldering as she left the field in San Luis Obispo, Calif., on Saturday.
Heen batted .571 and knocked in six runs in Hawaii’s three-game Big West sweep of Cal Poly over the weekend. That stat line was good for conference player of the week honors on Monday.
It was the first award this season for the UH junior catcher/first baseman and the second of her career. The Hollister, Calif., native hit a home run in the opener of the series (a 6-1 win), her BWC-best 11th of the year. She kept it up in Saturday’s doubleheader sweep of the Mustangs, with a combined five RBIs in the 4-0 and 12-0 wins.
For the season, Heen is batting a team-high .404 with 35 RBIs.
Third baseman Nicole Lopez was the Big West player of the week on Feb. 25 for UH (24-10 overall), which is tied with Cal State Fullerton atop the conference standings at 5-1.
UH hosts UC Santa Barbara (7-30, 1-5) in the first contest of a three-game series at 6 p.m. Friday.
Congrats to Callee Heen for MWC POW. Well deserved. But two other Wahine, in my book, deserve honorable mention for the series – JMikaela Gandia-Mak who hit .454 for the series. and Jennifer Iseri. These two are sixth and seventh in the batting order and gave a boost from the lower half.
I’m liking what I’m seeing out of this team. The depth of this team can range from a ton of arsenal at their disposal, especially hitting-wise. Each of them have had their best moments during BWC play, and it can prove to be good to their team, especially should Lopez or Heen struggle. Both of them are their best returners last year, and it sometimes can change when the team shifts into another gear and bails them out.
During the LBSU series, Lopez struggled mightily, having gone 0-for-6 in the doubleheader, and 1-for-10 in the series, but got bailed out by Callee Heen’s mercy-rule home run and others that had stepped up and make up for her struggles. Iseri, who didn’t score a single hit in non-conference, gone 0-for-18 in that stretch, and all of a sudden emerges with a huge wake-up call, going 3-for-4 in the doubleheader with two singles and a double. Veldman, who gone 0-for-15 at one point in non-conference, shovel-whacked a 3-run homer in game 2 of the doubleheader against LBSU. Sojka, after a bad bloop from LBSU’s shortstop, added insult-to-injury with an RBI single to pretty much made the game hard for LBSU to try and recover from.
The Cal Poly series, I think we can all agree that Lopez has found her groove again, after going 0-for-10, spanning the LBSU doubleheader and the first Cal Poly game, she goes 3-for-7 in the doubleheader against the Mustangs. Callee Heen even had a great game in the series, as mentioned, 4-for-7 with a home run. Rossi had her best outing, going 3-for-4 in game 2 of the Cal Poly doubleheader. Even Gandia-Mak’s 5-for-11 is impressive. The depth of this team is really intriguing because there’s so many different weapons that this team could rely upon. Of the team though, Cheeks and Iseri in their at-bats, have gotten a base hit in all (Or some) of their conference appearances. (Cheeks in the stretch is 7-for-21 in her 6 appearances, and Iseri, 7-for-16 in 5 appearances)
This team is a “Pick-your-poison” roulette because you’ll never know who will put the needle in the coffin on the opposing team and who will be the one to have their best night. And they need to stay hot to compete with the much tougher foes in the conference, especially their next match-ups against UCSB before facing the oh-so-tough Cal State Fullerton, in which they haven’t won a series against them since 2015. They gotta stay on their toes and play hard from here on out. Go get them, girls!
If Brittany Hitchcock stays healthy, they’re going to win the Big West.