EVANSTON, Ill. -- If ever there was a time for the Northwestern softball team to feel collectively sorry for itself, this was it.

Coming off a disappointing 2010 spring season in which the Wildcats failed to make the NCAA tournament for the first time in eight years, a campaign that ended with an unpleasantly appropriate thud in a 16-0 loss in the regular-season finale, they dropped their first game of the fall exhibition season against Loyola. All the promise of a talented freshman class and a sizable returning core bent on redemption seemed no match for the angst of an all-too-familiar false step.

But Michala Batts wasn't going to stand for that.

The team's biggest fan, or perhaps its unofficial youngest member, 11-year-old Michala instructed her big sister, Wildcats senior Michelle Batts, to drag a tackling dummy over to a field near the softball diamond in Evanston during a break before the day's second game. There she urged the players, those she knew well and those newcomers whose names and faces she was just learning, to take out their frustrations on the dummy -- first one at a time, then teaming up two at a time.

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