On Thursday, ISU softball coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler heads back to Missouri, her alma mater, to face the Tigers.

Gemeinhardt-Cesler was a two-time team MVP and three-time All-Big 12 tournament team performer for Missouri. She ranks second in hits (231) and triples (25) for the Tigers.

“I loved the time that I was there, and I had a great experience. I loved the university,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “The coach that I played for isn’t there anymore, so it probably has a little bit different feeling, but I think it’s a great place to be.”

She said, however, she will not let herself be overcome by emotion. She says when it comes to playing the Tigers, they are “just another team.”

“I definitely want to win, but I think that every time we play anybody, especially in the Big 12, we want to win,” she said.

The Tigers (33-19), however, will be a difficult opponent. They are in second place in the Big 12 and playing strong.

“I think that they definitely have been playing well,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

“You look at the team and you wonder, ‘What do they do well?’ and it seems like they just take care of business. They have Jen Bruck, who has thrown a lot of innings for them but doesn’t have as low of an ERA as the Nebraska pitchers have.

“It just seems like they have strung together what they have needed to win, whether it’s been five singles in a row to score runs or [Bruck] throws well enough to keep them in ball games so when they do score, they do have an opportunity to win.”

The Cyclones are going in another direction, having lost their last five games. The team attributes this mostly to inability to put points on the board.

“A problem that we have had throughout the season is scoring runs,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “We need to be able to score in order to win. Al [senior pitcher Alyssa Ransom] has thrown well for the last six weeks or so, well enough that we should be winning more than we are. She needs to not change what she is doing. When we get runners on, we need to have better execution and score when we have the opportunity to score.”

The Cyclones started to do this in the second game of the doubleheader against Baylor this weekend. They lost the game 7-4, but were able to score four runs in the last two innings.

“In the end, we came back and scored runs,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said. “We need to find a way to do that throughout the entire game.”