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SOU softball team to square off against rival OIT By Rich Rosenthal For The Tidings Seeking to protect its No. 17 national ranking and a one-game lead in the Cascade Conference title chase, the Southern Oregon University softball team faces a pair of rivals - both old and new - this weekend. The Raiders (18-6 overall, 5-1 CCC) traverse the Cascade mountain range Saturday morning for a Noon twinbill in Klamath Falls against two-time defending league champion Oregon Tech (13-15, 3-3). On Sunday, another institutional athletics nemesis, Western Oregon (13-10), visits SOU's diamond for the first time since the Raiders program came out of mothballs in 2001. Southern, which won both contests at OIT last season, is poised to supplant Tech as softball champions, but the Owls, who are 29-5 on their home field over the past three seasons, have a chance to resuscitate pennant hopes and throw the five-team circuit pennant race into disarray with a sweep. Meanwhile, the Wolves, who were idle for much of the month of March due to inclement weather, are ranked No. 6 in the NCAA Div. II West Region, enter the Sunday non-conference doubleheader on a two-game slide but are 4-2 in Great Northwest Conference play and 1-1 against Cascade Conference teams. — Southern Oregon is the leader out of the Cascade Conference gate, and the Raiders at or near the top of the league statistical charts as well. As a team, SOU is tops in the five-team circuit in most of the major categories: batting average (.319), slugging percentage (.435), RBIs (110), homers (13), earned run average (1.63), opposing batting average (.227) and pitched strikeouts (120 in 150 innings). Individually, Brandi Brown is a leading candidate for MVP status based on her loop-leading numbers for dingers (four), RBIs (29), doubles (nine) as well as her team-best .380 batting average. Junior first baseman Lisa Aitchison leads the conference in walks (18) and on-base percentage (.506); sophomore second baseman Haley Varley is tops for runs scored (22) and third overall for base hits (30); and sophomore centerfielder Seanna Doyel is No. 1 for sacrifice bunts (five). — Oregon Tech snapped a five-game losing streak with a 2-0, five-inning, weather-shortened triumph at Albertson on Sunday that kept the school's chances for a third straight conference title alive for at least another weekend. The Owls lost three top 2002 players to graduation (All-Americans Megan Webber and Leah Azevedo and three-year staff ace Leslie Ernstrom), but the Techsters remain formidable due to the return of senior regional all-star shortstop Lindy Schneider (.376 batting average) and the arrival of junior transfers Nikki Staley (.402 BA, 17 RBIs) and Kelsey Madsen (4-1, 1.71 ERA). Western Oregon, which went hitless in a 1-0, eight-inning loss at CSU-Stanislaus last Sunday, is batting just .205 as a team but sports a winning record for the year thanks to two of the GNAC's top pitchers: Seniors Allison Sempsis (7-5, 0.98 ERA) and Tracy Jones (5-4, 1.58). Sunday's contests are the first between the schools on the diamond since the spring of 1982. Track and Field Southern Oregon University invades the Oregon Institute of Technology campus for both softball and track and field competition this Saturday. The Raider thinclads join Humboldt State, Shasta College and College of the Siskiyous and the host Owls in the OIT Invitational field. The fifth-annual meet is the seventh of 11 season opportunities for SOU athletes to achieve qualifying standard for the NAIA Championships. As of last Saturday, the Raiders have one automatic qualifier (Jeff Bentley in the javelin) and four provisionals (Megan Heuberger in the intermediate hurdles; Brook Jaentsch in the high jump; Hakeem Young in the pole vault; and Joe Sheire in the 400 hurdles). Southern finished second behind the homestanding Techsters at last year's Klamath get-together but wound up outdistancing the Owls at the Cascade Conference championships a month later. — Two Raiders are atop NAIA individual performance lists and three others rank in the top-12. Bentley's career-best 210-8 toss is the country's best of the season, nearly four feet better than the No. 2 performer, while Heuberger, who placed fourth nationally in the intermediate hurdles in 2002, is No. 1 so far this season with a 1:04.76 clip. Other ranked performers are Young (sophomore, third in the pole vault, 15-0), Jaentsch (sixth in the high jump, 5-4) and Sheire (senir, 12th in the intermediate hurdles, 55.24). Bentley is a two-time javelin All-American. Women's Tennis Having secured the school's sixth consecutive 10-win season in the final day of the regular-season, the Southern Oregon University women's tennis team is idle until April 25-26, when it hosts the NAIA Region I tournament. The Raiders (10-4) are the first team other than Lewis-Clark State to host the regional fracas in at least 10 years. Southern will likely serve as the No. 3 seed in the five-team event behind eighth-ranked LCSC and Alberta, which are responsible for two of SOU's four season setbacks. Albertson and British Columbia round out the field. The tourney champion receives an automatic berth to the NAIA Championships in Georgia in May. — Fifth-year head coach Gail Patton has seen her Raider tennis teams win plenty of times over the past five years (58 of 74 duals to be exact), but she considers last weekend's wins at Dominican (5-4) and Mills College (7-2) to be among the program's most meaningful. Because staff ace Bridget Wagner stayed behind in order to catch up on academics, the Raiders toppled both NAIA rivals with only five players. SOU overcame forfeiting the No. 3 doubles and No. 6 singles matches to both teams by winning 12 of the other 14 individual clashes. Friday at Dominican, Southern swept the doubles events and clinched the win with easy triumphs from sophomores Megan Loeding, Heather Virell and Erika Moller at the 2-3 and 4 singles spots, respectively. All three players finished 4-0 on the Bay Area trek the following day at Mills, while freshman Katie Ketchum, a prep doubles specialist prior to her arrival at SOU, posted her first careercollegiate singles win over an opponent from a four-year institution. Senior Kristin Maloney went 3-1 in her debut at the Raider No. 1 singles spot, and improved to a team-best 20-6 in the process. 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