In the toughest game of the season so far for the Cyclones, the team rose to the challenge by upsetting No. 12 Fresno State. The rest of the tournament didn’t go as well for Iowa State.

“The Fresno State win was great. That is sort of what we have been searching for the whole time as far as just playing well defensively, and even though we just had two hits, we were hitting the ball well all day,” head coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “I thought that that was the silver lining of the trip. I think outside of that, I don’t think that we played really well.”

The weekend didn’t send a strong message about what kind of a team Iowa State will have this year. The Cyclones played well in their win over the No. 12 Bulldogs, but went 0-4 against the unranked teams they faced.

“I think with the win over Fresno State we proved that we can beat a lot of teams and we are a good team — we also proved that we make some mistakes and we have some mental lapses that cost us, and we are still trying to figure those things out,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

Gemeinhardt-Cesler saw those mental lapses on both offense and defense. Defensively, the Cyclones had 11 errors on the weekend.

“We are just struggling, we are making mistakes that we shouldn’t be making,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

Part of the reason for the Cyclone errors could be that they have to practice inside on turf rather than on dirt fields.

“You play on the weekends on dirt, and we come back and we try to fix it on turf, then we go back and we do it again,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

Offensively, the Cyclones had problems as well.

“It doesn’t really matter how many runs we give up if we aren’t scoring any,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

The Cyclones were out-hit in all four losses, and even in their win over Fresno State, they only got two hits.

“We just didn’t do a very good job with at-bats, you know, we need to make adjustments faster. We didn’t do a very good job of executing once we had people on,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “We just struggled offensively.”

The Cyclones feel they will have to be mentally tougher in order to improve on this weekend’s performance.

“We have to be able to make a bad play and come back or have a bad at-bat and come back. We have to be able to do that in order to be successful,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

“You know, our game is all about failure. You know, you fail seven out of 10 times or six out of 10 times and you’re a great player.”