The Simpson softball team was picked to finish seventh in the American Rivers Conference this season, despite a semifinal round appearance in the conference tournament and only graduating a couple of key players. Head coach Brent Mathias tells KNIA Sports the placement fueled the Storm to work hard early in the season.

We were excited from the standpoint of we thought seventh was a little low. Somebody has to be seventh, but we didn’t think that’s where we were going to finish. So we felt maybe a little slighted just because of all of our returners that we had. We had more returners than any other team, and all of our pitching coming back. We were excited for the season from the standpoint of preparing to sneak up on some teams, even though we had beaten two NCAA regional teams in our conference and played well at the end of the season when it mattered most.”

The Storm graduated three seniors from this year’s team.