Over the last few weeks, the ISU softball team faced some of the toughest pitching the country has to offer.

It doesn’t get any easier this weekend, when they take on Megan Gibson and the rest of the No. 6 Texas A&M Aggies (34-6, 6-0 Big 12).

The Aggies are riding a six-game winning streak, with all those wins coming against Big 12 teams. The Cyclones (23-15, 1-3 Big 12) are heading in the opposite direction, having lost their last four games and scoring only a total of four runs in those losses. They’ll have a tough time getting their offense going against A&M’s pitching staff.

The Aggies lead the Big 12 in ERA, wins and fewest runs allowed, and they also rank second in strikeouts and fewest walks allowed. They’re led by Gibson, who has won Big 12 Pitcher of the Week honors five times this season and has put a choke hold on every offense she’s faced.

In 22 games pitched, Gibson is 21-0 with a 0.92 ERA, striking out 155 batters in 145 innings – the kind of numbers you’d expect to see in a video game, not from a real athlete in a Division I conference.

“She’s 21-0, but she’s not even their number-one pitcher,” said co-head coach Gary Hines.

“They’re kind of 1-A and 1-B. That gives you a good indication of how good this A&M team is.”

Their ace, two-time All-American Amanda Scarborough, will miss the rest of the 2008 season due to a major foot injury she suffered against Stephen F. Austin.

Gibson doesn’t just pitch, either. She leads the team with 11 home runs and 35 runs batted in and is second, to Scarborough, in batting average. Texas A&M has nine players with at least 11 runs batted in and five players hitting .333 or better. The Aggies have already beaten some of the best teams in the country, including No. 8 Arizona, No. 9 Houston, No. 24 Washington, No. 25 DePaul and once-No. 15 Baylor, which has since been dropped from the rankings.

Despite playing its highest-ranked opponent of the year, Hines believes that his team is capable of pulling off an upset.

“They’re ranked pretty high, and we expect them to play that way,” he said. “If we’re going to win, we have to take charge of the opportunities we get against them, we’ve got to throw seven complete innings and we’ve got to hit better. If we play ball the way I know we can, we can beat anybody. We have a chance against them — we’ve competed with their core players for a couple of years now and we’ve played them pretty well.”

The Cyclones lost both of last year’s games against the then-No. 3 Aggies, 4-1 and 8-0, in College Station. Texas A&M was picked to win the Big 12 conference this year, and Iowa State was picked to finish last. The Aggies lead the all-time series 27-5.

Freshman Rachel Zabriskie, who hails from Austin, believes playing against tougher opponents now will help the Cyclones further develop and hone their skills as they continue Big 12 play and reach the home stretch of their schedule.

“The last four teams that we’ve played have had great pitchers, [Texas’ Brittany] Barnhill, [Iowa’s Brittany] Wiel and [Amanda] Zust, and now Gibson,” she said. “I think that seeing pitching like that consistently can only make us better. We might struggle against it, but I can see that the offense is trying to build up confidence and they’re just going to explode on somebody.”

Her coach agrees.

“Between Iowa, Texas and Texas A&M, that’s the best pitching we’re going to see all year,” Hines said. “Some of these pitchers are in the top 1 percent of the nation, and by the time we’re done playing them, it should make it easier for us against the teams who don’t have these quality of pitchers. We’ll face more pitchers down the stretch that maybe don’t throw as hard, make a few more mistakes, and in facing this kind of pitching that we’re facing now – it can only help prepare us.”