On Sunday, Michigan had just three hits, and all came from the same player.
Lou Allan.
In a game where the Wolverines struggled to generate offense, the senior first baseman willed her team to victory. Allan went three for three at the plate, and hammered the game-winning home run over the centerfield wall in the bottom of the sixth.
“Well, that’s what you hope for from your seniors,” Michigan coach Carol Hutchins said. “Not that they’re always the heroes, but that they’re steady and consistent. And (Allan) has been. And (Allan) has been a good majority of this season. She came through for us.”
You’d think that her steady rise to the top of Michigan’s hitting statistics meant that a game like this was probably easy to see coming. After Sunday, Allan sits in second place on the team in batting average, tied for the lead in home runs with 10 and leads the team in RBI by a margin of 14 with 42 — of note, Allan is averaging over one RBI per game.
But not quite.
Against the same pitcher on Friday, the Scarlet Knights’s Ashley Hitchcock, Allan went without a hit in her three at bats.
“Coming back I knew that she wasn’t gonna beat me again,” Allan said. “And I just had the mentality that if you throw it in my zone I’m going to hit it.”
Allan took no time to assert herself against Hitchcock on Sunday. In the first inning, where she was the first Wolverine batter to get a hit, she sent the ball screaming towards Rutgers shortstop Kiana Workman. The ball was hit so hard that Workman couldn’t corral it and Allan got to first.
“For me it was just keeping it simple,” Allan said of what she did differently this time. “I went in there trying to just get a base hit every at bat, I knew that we just needed bases, I knew that we just needed people to get on, so that we could hit some runners in, score some runs. And I think that that kind of just kept me calm and focused.”
Allan did just that in the fourth.
She walked up to the plate still as the only Michigan player with a hit and added to her total. A quick single got the Wolverine on base. Just a few batters later, sophomore utility player Audrey LeClair — who came on to pinch run for Allan — scored Michigan’s first run of the game.
But that would not be the only time an Allan hit would lead to Michigan offense.
Lou Allan put her team over the edge when she got her tenth home run of the season, tying her for the team lead with senior third baseman Taylor Bump. She left no doubt when she sailed one over the centerfield wall in the bottom of the sixth. Her — and the Wolverines’ — third and final hit on the day.
On a day where offense was hard to come by, Michigan looked to a senior playing what could be her final game at Alumni field, Lou Allan.
She delivered.