After winning all its games last fall season, it was a disappointing end to this fall season for the ISU softball team as it finished with a record of 6-7.

Sophomore pitcher Alyssa Ransom was expecting a better fall season, but said this doesn’t necessarily have to be bad thing.

“Hopefully this will show us our flaws, and we’ll work that much harder during the offseason,” Ransom said. “It’s good to work on those flaws during September and October rather than March and April.”

Head coach Ruth Crowe said she was glad her team finished with a losing record.

“These guys don’t understand what it means to compete at a Division I level, and, if we had gone 15-0, they would have been in a for a rude awakening when we got to the spring,” Crowe said. “They would have started thinking that they were really good when they weren’t.”

Senior outfielder Misty Kimura was also disappointed to finish with a losing record.

“I expected us to come out and have a pretty good fall season,” she said. “I think not having [catcher Ashley] Killeen really hurt us, although [Dena] De Stigter really stepped up for us behind the plate.”

Killeen was lost for the remainder of the fall season during the Fall Hawkeye Classic on Sept. 18 and 19 in Iowa City last month after fouling off a pitch that sailed back into her face, breaking her nose in three places.

Crowe said losing Killeen was hard, but she thinks that in the long run, it helped the team.

Wednesday will the be the Cyclones’ last outdoor practice. They’ll have the next two weeks off before starting practice again.

Crowe said the indoor practices are her main teaching times because she works with the players at the individual level rather than the team level.

Kimura said the team really needs to improve its defense in the offseason. She said that the offense will improve if the defense does so first.

She said her problem during the fall season wasn’t hitting the ball, it was where she hit it— usually right at defenders.

To make up for that, she said, she will work on her pitch selection and staying on the ball longer.

“If I didn’t have a good at bat, it was because I wasn’t swinging at a good pitch,” Kimura said.

Ransom said she will be working with Crowe during the winter.

Crowe said that, mentally, Ransom has a lot to learn since she is still a young pitcher. She needs to learn to have better control of her mental game and regain her focus, something she lost during the fall season.

Ransom, fellow sophomore Katie Reichling and junior Kristen Karanzias have all been working together to create a solid pitching staff.

Crowe said she hopes that sophomore Amie Ford will be cleared to play, but her status is still in the air at the moment.

Ford, a transfer student, has not yet been released from her prior school.

Crowe said she is looking forward to the experience her team will have in the spring.

“We’ll have almost all these people back again. So, finally we can start saying we aren’t as young anymore,” Crowe said.

The Cyclones will resume their schedule in February when they travel to Nevada to participate in the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Tournament.