For the second week in a row, the Cyclones lost, but just like a week ago, that loss was the lone damper on the weekend as the Cyclones went on to a 4-1 finish at the Sleep Inn Classic.

After rolling to a 6-1 victory over North Texas on Friday, the Cyclones ran into North Texas.

The Mean Green broke a 1-1 tie wide open in the third inning with a six-run surge.

“We just had really one bad defensive inning that we just didn’t really recover from,” coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

After that inning, the Cyclones battled back a little bit, scoring three runs in the fifth and threatening in the second, but they were held in check with good pitching, keeping the Cyclones to just three hits in the game.

“The good thing that comes from it is we kind of started to have a bad inning like that against Wichita State and we were able to stop it,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “And that’s the big thing.”

The Wichita State game turned out to be one of the most exciting of the weekend.

After scoring six, four and eleven runs respectively in the tournament, the Cyclones were in for a different kind of game against the Shockers.

Iowa State was only able to muster up three hits. Luckily for the Cyclones, one was a shot over the outfield fence in the fourth inning for the lone run of the game.

The Cyclones were able to get the win despite being outhit 8-3.

“Rachel [Zabriskie] threw very well, which was great,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “You know on paper it looks like Wichita State played better then what we did. They outhit us, we had more errors, they left more people on base then we did.

“You know, it just came down to Alex Johnson, hitting a pitch out of the park. That was a good win for us.”

Getting the win against Wichita State was good for the Cyclones’ overall record, but Gemeinhardt-Cesler feels that the experience of playing in a tight, low scoring game like that was just as valuable to the team.

“It’s so important that you are able to win one run games,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “But I think that ultimately, there are so many different ways to win games and whether you are coming from behind, you’re ahead all the time, it’s close, it’s not, you know, it’s just one more situation that we have gone through in preseason that hopefully will help us out down the road.”