The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Wednesday, April 20, 2022 — 11 Big moments lift Michigan to 2-1 weekend against Maryland JOEY GOODSIR Daily Sports Writer As fifth-year third baseman Tay- lor Bump stepped into the batter’s box on Friday, it was clear a break- through was necessary. In extra innings, bleeding only one run would result in another conference loss. So the No. 22 Mich- igan softball team could not afford to strand runners in scoring posi- tion. For the Wolverines (26-13 over- all, 6-6 Big Ten), Bump’s sacrifice reach sparked a series-defining offensive shift that pushed them to 2-1 on their roadtrip against Mary- land (22-18, 8-4). While it’s easier to picture a breakthrough coming in the form of a powerful swing, Bump seized on her alternative strengths. She laid down a bunt a few feet in front of home plate, allowing graduate second baseman Melina Livingston to slide into home — ultimately the game-deciding run in a 5-3 win. “As a big power hitter, people don’t necessarily expect a lot of bunts to come off my bat, but I love bunting,” Bump said. “I think it’s something that is often put on the backburner a little bit … but I live for those moments. The opportunity to have a suicide squeeze moment — that’s huge.” As the imperfect record suggests, Michigan didn’t go without paying the price beforehand. The Wolver- ines suffered a 5-1 loss to the Ter- rapins on Thursday after stranding 10 runners. “Sometimes players end up try- ing to get hits as opposed to just tough through an at-bat and make solid contact,” Michigan associate head coach Bonnie Tholl said. “I think that was the mental adjust- ment that we made (Friday), where we were able to rally through some of those tough at-bats with two outs.” After Friday’s game-winning bunt it was an entirely different story, and this was reflected as much in the circle as at the plate. Maryland’s scoring that earned its sole win came from a two-run homer in the first inning and a rally in the fifth that ended senior right- hander Alex Storako’s weekend. On Friday, fifth-year left-hander Meghan Beaubien weathered the storm. Beaubien entered the sixth inning with the bases loaded and gave up only one hit. While the Terrapins tied the game, she held Maryland scoreless the rest of the way. Then, Beaubien’s pitching on Sat- urday proved much less stressful. There was a moment, just over two years ago, that I think will be burned into my memory forever. With COVID-19 shutting down the University and the world, the newsroom played host to an emer- gency last night of production. A fear of the unknown hung over the room, nervous and sad energy filled everyone. The night marched on, and one by one people left the newsroom — but not the sports section. I remember standing on the tile floor next to the conference room and looking back at the sports desk. I remember seeing Lane laugh as she talked with Lily. I remember Jared, Nick, Spencer and Brandon all doing stupid things. I remember Ethan standing next to me, on the verge of crying for probably the eighth time that night. I remember saying something to him along the lines of, “This won’t go away. This’ll be back. We’ll be back.” Ethan never made it back for a night of production in the newsroom. *** The Michigan Daily was never about journalism for me. It wasn’t the culmination of a life-long pas- sion for Michigan sports or a step on the way to my dream of becom- ing a journalist. It wasn’t sup- posed to make me a talented sports reporter. Instead, I joined because my freshman seminar teacher had us read a men’s soccer article from The Daily in class. Lost and scared in Ann Arbor, I struggled to find friends or a place of belonging. Then we read that article in class and I thought to myself, “I like sports and I like writing, hopefully they take just anyone.” Thankfully, they did. That’s why I joined. Why I stayed is because of Mike and Laney and so many other people who made it the place to be. Talk- ing about sports, telling stories, playing touch football and euchre, laughing and forgetting about the problems that swirled around us, they made this big university small. The place and the people are what The Daily is to me. The place and the people are everything to SportsMonday: An imperfect, bittersweet goodbye LANE KIZZIAH Daily Sports Writer Today, I went to my last meet- ing at The Michigan Daily, which has me thinking a lot about my first. It was the fall of freshman year, and I went to The Daily’s mass meeting planning to join the news section or maybe arts. Growing up, I wasn’t exactly a sports fanatic. I went to high school in downtown Chicago where we didn’t have a football team. I’d never been to a professional basketball game, and I really only went to Cubs games for the hotdogs. But the sports section lured me in. There were probably 20 guys sitting around a desk that was covered in a seemingly ran- dom assortment of crap — tons of discarded sheets of paper, a toy Transformer, an empty fishbowl. The bulletin boards were covered with old press passes, notes and edited stories that had accumulat- ed over the years. They said they were the most fun section, and that was all I needed to hear. When I signed up, I thought The Daily would be a fun little extracurricular. I had no way of anticipating all of the different things it would mean to me over the course of four years. But at times, I didn’t think I would spend four years on the section. I didn’t love Michigan when I first got here and even con- templated transferring. It was the sports section that made me fall in love with this school. There’s something about The Daily —not just the work of it, but the people, the culture, the physical space — that makes you feel like you have a purpose. At times, it’s been my biggest source of pride. It’s been the home base I raced to after my last class, a place I refused to leave until 2 am when games of euchre had run their course and 50-cent Cokes had lost their appeal. At other times, it’s been the source of hair-tugging, fist-balling, snot-nosing frustration. But even those times don’t seem so bad now that I’m saying goodbye. As a Sports Writer, beat mem- ber and, finally, Managing Sports Editor, The Daily has taken up different amounts of my time and consciousness, each of which has made me into the person I am today in different ways. I have loved and cherished each one of these roles, but none have made as big of a difference in my life as the weeks following that first meeting. The weeks that made me stay at Michigan. I’ve tried to pinpoint what it was that originally drew me into the Daily, but there was no single fac- tor. It’s a blur of 2 am sledding trips, walks to softball games, jumps in the river, a sense of confidence and a passion for something I knew I was good at. And every softball game I covered and every late- night Denny’s run I went on made me feel like I was part of something bigger, something important. My co-MSE, Kent, has had to remind me that we’re never going to be satisfied with what we say in these final columns. There’s no word that encompasses the feeling of complete commitment, com- plete acceptance, complete love that I’ve found here. Any attempt I make at summarizing this experi- ence will be, at best, an inaccurate approximation. At worst, it’ll be really fucking cheesy. But anyone who’s ever been on the sports section will know the feeling I’m talking about. It’s in all of that seemingly random crap cov- ering the sports desk. It’s in NYPD runs and chair monkey games and road trip stories that aren’t funny to anyone outside of the section because they just wouldn’t get it. And, as anyone who’s graduated could probably tell you, it’s really hard to give that feeling up. Last fall, I was interviewing Daily sports alumni, and I asked what it was like to go back to the newsroom after you graduate: “Some of my best memories in college were made because of The Michigan Daily and you step into it and you kind of get echoes of those memories,” someone told me. “You look over to the design desk or the statement desk and you see the people who you cared about and you loved when you were there yourself, but then you blink and you realize that the person who’s sitting there isn’t the person your mind imagined was sitting there — it’s someone completely different, making their own memories. It’s bittersweet.” Today, at my last meeting, I finally understood what he was talking about. I looked around at all of the new people that had joined the section since my tenure ended in December, talking about all of the inside jokes and funny stories that had happened this semester. And it was bittersweet. It isn’t my section anymore. It’ll keep growing and changing and evolv- ing long after I’m gone. But it’ll always be there for the next freshman who walks in and decides to make it their own. The Daily. The newsroom is where I met my roommates and some of my best friends. It’s where I went when I was happy and where I went when I was sad. When I was failing classes and the possibility of a future seemed ludicrous, the newsroom remained a steadying force. Its soft roof, the posters, the items hiding in the corner, a ketch- up packet on the light, a broken Transformers toy, a woven basket, ping pong paddles, random play- ing cards strewn across the desk, an Indiana mini bat, a maize t-shirt from a State News game past, nap- kins and forks, Steve Pikiell’s head, pens and so many more items lit- ter the background of my favorite memories. The newsroom had, over the course of 18-odd months, become the constant in my life. Become the source of my life. Then, on that depressing March night, it was taken away. Over the next two years, I changed a lot. The Daily changed a lot. The sports section changed a lot, despite our best efforts. Zoom bonding and Pictionary became standard-issue ways to stay con- nected, but we all know it wasn’t the same. The words I told Ethan on the last night of production came back to haunt me, eating away at my every waking moment. The sports section wasn’t even close to what it had been before. We were barely surviving. *** I can’t properly convey to you what this place and community mean to me. Emotions are not my strong suit — anyone who’s had more than a three second inter- action with me will tell you that — but The Daily is the epicenter of my college experience. It’s the only reason I’ve cried in college, all three times. It made me angry, frustrated, ashamed, disappointed and just plain sad more times than I could count. It showed me how to grow up and how to deal with problems. It did what this esteemed Universi- ty often failed to do and taught me. It gave me my happiest moments. It’s a place I’m forever indebted to. This past fall, when we finally returned to the newsroom and I walked up the stairs to this fan- tastic place and took in the empty shell of the sports desk, a broad smile stretched across my face. When the sophomores and other writers I hadn’t seen in person for months walked into the news- room, I couldn’t have been happi- er. I was home and hopefully they would be too. Months passed, and still things weren’t the same as before. They wouldn’t be while I was one of their editors. But things were better. The sports section wasn’t, as I feared, dying. The reasons I joined, the reasons I wanted to invest so much time and effort into this section started popping up and working their way out from the shadows. Four months after my tenure ended, I walked into the news- room to put my penultimate article through edits. I didn’t know the names of half the faces clustered around the sports desk; they were a bunch of freshmen and sophomores who joined in the winter, after my editor tenure ended. As I went through edits, I lis- tened to snippets of conversa- tion and watched people buzz around to share stories and laugh. I bugged some people about a fea- ture for women’s gymnastics and enjoyed some hijinks. I’d never felt more at peace. A book had replaced the ketchup packet, the transformer was hid- den somewhere and the desk was still too clean. But everything I’d wanted for two years was there on that night. The memories I’d formed as a freshman and sophomore rushed back. The fear and doubt and worry that lived in my mind dis- appeared in an instant. On our final night of produc- tion this year, I’m going to stand in the same spot I did two years ago. I’m going to look back and see a freshman on sports do something stupid and have their friends — who are also on sports — laugh at them. I’m going to see people try to give edits as chaos unfolds around them. I’m going to watch, in real time, as someone forms the same bond with this place that I have. I’m going to see something I will never see again, and it will be a long time before I feel that happy. SportsMonday: All I ever wanted The Michigan baseball team has found the zone. In an up and down year, three straight games of consistent pitch- ing have been a difficult feat. The pitchers showed flashes of potential all year. But against Michigan State, they finally put it all together. The Wolverines (20-15 overall, 6-3 Big Ten) dominated on Saturday and Sunday, winning 8-2 and 6-3 respectively, to complete a three- game weekend sweep of the Spar- tans (13-19, 2-7). The pitching staff showed its top form in what could be a turning point for the remainder of the season. “I think it’s just the thing our staff needed,” sophomore right- hander Chase Allen said. “ … We got a bunch of great dudes with great work and work ethic and a great pitching coach leading us … so I just think it was a matter of time and now we’re finally seeing it.” But for the pitchers to feast, first the offense had to establish itself. Going into Saturday, the Michigan bats remained hot from their 18-run slugfest on Friday. With two outs and two men on in the first inning, junior designated hitter Tito Flores sparked the hot start with a two-RBI double over the second baseman’s head. Min- utes later, senior first baseman Jack Van Remortel mashed a two-run double of his own to establish a 5-0 lead before Michigan State even reached the plate. After the hot start, junior right- hander Cam Weston didn’t give the Spartans any breathing room. Containing their hitters in a 1-2-3 inning, Weston made quick work in one of the Wolverines’ most com- plete innings of the year. Weston’s dominance continued through seven innings, as he tied his season-high with nine strikeouts and allowed just two runs. In relief, junior left-hander Jacob Denner cruised through the final batters, sealing the 8-2 victory. On Sunday, Allen notched the third dominant start of the week- end, throwing five scoreless innings and allowing just two hits. As a unit, Michigan’s starters had one of their best weekends of the season. Sophomore left-hander Connor O’Halloran, Weston and Allen combined for 21 strikeouts and conceded just four runs in 18 innings. “We’ve taken the punches, we’ve been knocked down and we’ve just played in so many different kinds of games,” Michigan coach Erik Bakich said. Read more at MichiganDaily.com Michigan pitching lives up to potential in sweep of Michigan State JOSEPH ZAIN RODGER Daily Sports Writer KENT SCHWARTZ Daily Sports Writer MADELINE HINKLEY/Daily Courtesy of Kent Schwartz Read more at MichiganDaily.com Sports