Colonels say focus on scouting aiding successes

Houston Baptist freshman Caitlyn Brockway stepped into the batter’s box in the top of the 1st inning two weekends ago.

Opposing her was Nicholls senior pitcher Megan Landry.

The two had never faced before in competitive action.

But because of a little advanced scouting, Landry had an edge. She popped out Brockway on an inside pitch, helping spark a first-inning surge for the Colonels.

Nicholls is rolling in Southland Conference play — one of a few teams on a short list of contenders to win the championship in a couple weeks.

Landry said one thing that’s set the Colonels apart this season is a renewed commitment to advanced scouting, touting that she believes Nicholls has a leg up on opponents because of the research they do before each series.

“We’ve really stepped up our game in scouting hitters and trying to pick hitters apart before we ever face them,” Landry said. “We watch more film that we used to on our opponents. We get tendencies and pick up little things that we can use and we have hitters in the cage imitate hitters so that when we see it in a game, it’s not new to us — even if it’s the first time we face a specific hitter. For us, that’s been a big part of why I believe we’ve been so successful.”

It’s a tedious process — tedious, but worth the effort.

Landry said before a series, she learns about an opponent’s lineup through film study and also work with coach Angel Santiago and the Nicholls staff.

From there, she said she works to create a plan for each individual hitter in the opposing order, while also accounting for specific situations.

Landry joked that the process was like an extra class for her throughout the season.

But the process is working.

Landry is a 20-game winner and unquestionably one of the best players in the Southland Conference, and catcher Kali Clement said a lot of that hard work behind the scenes is a reason why she’s the ace of a pitching staff that ranks near the top of the conference in several major statistics.

“For our pitching staff, we’re really working hard on location and ball placement this year,” Clement said. “We spend so much time studying what to throw to who and in what counts and in what situations. It’s a lot of hard work, but that little extra mile gives us a little bit of an edge.”

And for Landry, a big part of scouting is also having an honest assessment of yourself and your own abilities in the circle.

The senior hurler is a four-year starter for the Colonels. By now, she’s faced every, single team in the conference more than a half-dozen times and she’s faced most multi-year starting players at least 10-12 at-bats.

“Everyone knows me,” Landry said with a laugh. “For better or for worse.”

So this offseason, Landry said one of the things she did was scouted herself. She said she tracked her tendencies and became aware of some things that opponents may see so that in live games, she could be conscious of those things and could buck trends.

Landry said she also worked to slightly change some of the spin angles on her throws in an effort to confuse hitters.

“It was important for me to tweak things up and change up our patterns to stay effective,” Landry said. “I tweaked some spins and tried to hit some different locations and it was a necessity. By now, teams know me. They have all the film and they’ve seen my body of work. I had to be aware of that and adjust to their adjustments.”

It may all sound nitpicky, but a peak at the Southland standings will show that an inch is a mile in the tightly contested league.

A total of seven teams had winning conference records through six Southland series. Of those seven teams, just four games separated first from seventh place and the seventh place team trailed fourth place by just one game.

Landry said to survive in such a dog eat dog league, one has to be willing to put in the time and the effort and she said she hopes all those little things pay off big for Nicholls in their quest to win the Southland after two-straight runner-up finishes.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “We have some true powerhouses in this conference. We have to scout well and step up and compete with the other teams in our conference because there are a lot of teams in this league who can win it. At the end of the day, it will be who takes advantage of opportunities and does the best in those situations in games — who’s going to get the bunt down or the clutch hit. We believe we have what it takes to be the team who does that because of the time and effort that we’ve put in.” •

Megan Landry

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