In its first non-tournament action of the campaign, the Binghamton softball team won two of three games against Mercer last weekend to earn its first series win. After splitting a pair of pitchers’ duels Friday, an outburst of pop and contact from BU’s bats on Saturday clinched the series and secured Binghamton head coach Jess Bump’s 100th win at the helm.

“We were excited to get down to Georgia and get a 3 game series in before we start conference play next weekend,” Bump wrote. “The dynamic of 3 is definitely different than 5, so we wanted to see from all sides of the ball what the girls were going to bring and how our pitchers would do with 2 less games.”

Binghamton (14-9) and Mercer (15-14) opened Friday’s doubleheader in a dead heat. Junior pitcher Brianna Roberts got the ball for Binghamton and opened the game with three scoreless frames, but Mercer met the challenge by retiring the first 12 Bearcats they faced. The Bears plated the game’s first run off an error in the bottom of the fourth, but Binghamton responded just one inning later. At the top of the fifth, the Bearcats made their two lone hits of the game as freshman infielder Rachel Carey and senior outfielder Sarah Rende blasted a pair of home runs to make it 2-1.

This would be all the run support Roberts needed, as despite struggling with her command to the tune of six total walks and loading the bases in the seventh, the southpaw coaxed the necessary outs to earn the complete-game victory.

“The hit column doesn’t show our offensive production from game one,” Bump wrote. “We hit the ball really hard all game, just right [at] people so had nothing to show for it. But we were happy with how the girls stuck with it and scratched across runs.”

The backend of the doubleheader saw the Bears quickly jump ahead in the first, peppering junior pitcher Olivia Kennedy with a trio of singles that would send in two runners to go up 2-0. This set the tone for the contest — Mercer smacked 10 singles in the game to give Kennedy a 2.17 WHIP on the day, with not a single Bears’ hit going for extra bases. While junior catcher Emma Lawson responded with an RBI single of her own in the third inning, Mercer bopped a third RBI single in the fifth to go up 3-1. BU failed to find any more runs, with six straight outs across the final two frames cementing the defeat and evening out the series heading into Saturday.

“In general, from a pitching side we need to limit walks, and our defense needs to make outs, outs,” Bump wrote. “We didn’t get anything going offensively but our pitchers should be comfortable giving up 3 runs and knowing our offense is good enough to score more.”

With the series on the line Saturday, the Bears continued to leverage weak contact and errors by the Bearcats to plate two runs in the third and one in the fourth to go up 3-0. However, the Bearcats capitalized on singles and Mercer miscues to load the bases in the fifth. Lawson and Rende used this opportunity to notch a pair of singles that drove in three Bearcats and tied the ballgame. The decisive blow then came from sophomore infielder Elisa Allen, who smacked a grand slam to take a 7-3 lead. A two-RBI double from Carey in the sixth and an RBI single from graduate student outfielder Brianna Santos in the seventh gave Binghamton the insurance it needed to clinch the series with a 10-5 victory.

Saturday’s victory marked Bump’s 100th as BU’s skipper.

“100 is just a number,” Bump wrote. “But when I think about it I’ve been surrounded by great players and staff for 3 and a half years and [a lot] of hard work has been put in on and off the field by everyone involved.”

The Bearcats now set their sights on their home and America East opening series as they welcome Albany next weekend. The series opens Saturday, March 22, with first pitch set for 1 p.m. at the Bearcats Sports Complex in Vestal, New York.