The old adage: ‘slow and steady wins the race,’ proved true on Saturday for New Mexico.

The Lobos swept the Cyclones 3-1 and 12-4 on Saturday in Albuquerque, but Iowa State came back and took the Sunday series 18-5 and 7-5 in 10 innings to pick up the weekend split.

“We really should have left 4-and-0,” said outfielder Kelsey Kidwell “I mean, they are a good hitting team, but we are a better hitting team, and we are a better defensive team than we played.”

Regardless of what should have happened, Iowa State started the weekend off slowly.

“Maybe we were overconfident going into the games on Saturday,” sophomore short-stop Carrie Monroe said.

The Cyclones’ struggles on Saturday were mainly due to their difficulties on offense.

“We had a bunch of hits and we just couldn’t get them strung together,” said head coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler. “We continued to make some errors defensively, and when you don’t score runs and you make some errors it just makes it pretty hard to win.”

Part of Iowa State’s offensive problems stemmed from the Lobos unusual pitcher, Analise Rubalcava, who pitched both games on Saturday.

“She is definitely not what we practice with during the week,” Kidwell said. “She was a lot slower.”

While it may seem that slower pitching would be easier to hit, it is an adjustment when the hitter is used to seeing faster pitchers, although the Cyclones didn’t think that was a good excuse.

“I just think that Saturday, I don’t know if it could have gotten much worse and there is kind of honestly one way to go after that,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

After Rubalcava’s success in both games on Saturday, she again got the starting nod on Sunday. It proved to be one start too many for the Lobos as the Cyclones got used to the slower pitching speed.

“Bottom line is we need to be able to adjust to whatever is thrown at us and it shouldn’t take three games to do that,” Kidwell said.

Iowa State adjusted to the tune of 18 runs in the first three innings, including 16 runs, 10 earned, in 2.1 innings against Rubalcava.

“We weren’t hitting very well off her on Saturday so she came back and pitched again for the third game of the weekend on Sunday,” Kidwell said “And then we finally, after too long, picked up on her and we figured out how to hit her and we hit her very hard.”

Although the Cyclones hammered the Lobos hurlers in game one, Gemeinhardt-Cesler didn’t take full credit for the offensive explosion.

“I think 18 runs in a softball game is out of control,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

“Their team had five errors. As we know, any time you have a bunch of errors, there is a really good chance that someone is going to score a bunch of runs. But to credit our players, they were putting the ball in play really hard.”

Regardless of who was responsible for the runs, the team felt it gave them a boost, especially in the final game of the weekend after they had fallen behind by four runs.

“That was a big confidence booster for us,” Monroe said. “I think that probably helped us a lot in the second game when we were behind, we knew we could come back and hit their pitchers.”