by Sara Folkestad, UND Athletic Media Relations

GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- Offering some advice to the underclassmen on UND's softball team, senior Nicole Puerling says, “Don't take anything for granted. Four years will go by faster than you think.”

As the season wound down for this year's UND softball team, first baseman Puerling has been able to reflect on the improvements of this year's young team, as well as look back at her own career on the team the last four years.

This past season, Puerling has led the softball team in batting average (.322), slugging percentage (.626), on base percentage (.422), RBIs (26), and home runs (9) in leading the young Fighting Sioux softball team to a 9-33 record. She also finished her career as UND's career leader in home runs.

"We had a young team," Puerling said. "We had more freshmen than upperclassmen. It took half a season to get them to adjust, and they started to come."

Every sports team has its ups and downs, and softball is no different. When you have a young team, there are going to be growing pains.

"We talk a lot about how it's not about what happens," Puerling said, "it's how you react to it. We've done well with rolling with the punches and doing the little things correctly, and it's shown in the last three weeks, and we started to come out on top."

The youth of this year's team allowed Puerling to lend her experience and leadership to help some of the younger players develop their skills to the collegiate level. She says she has enjoyed showing them the ropes this season and can't help but smile now that they "get it." She also says that softball is a mental game, and it's one of the big things she has improved on since she was a freshman. She said this year's freshmen have been able to improve mentally, just like she has, which bodes well for the team's future seasons.

"My mental game has gone to the next level," Puerling said. "Understanding pitching as a hitter, picking up patterns and what pitches to hit in different situations are definitely things I've improved on. Softball is a huge mental game and experience helps to build the mental game."

Puerling says this season they have had the opportunity to play a lot of solid teams, particularly out in California, and they were all big name schools. Teams included Wisconsin, California State University-Bakersfield, Nebraska, Brigham Young, Cal Baptist, and Loyola Marymount, among others. She says the competition was great because those are the teams that have all the resources to be a top team and that is something UND is trying to build into, and playing those teams allows the team to get better.

Looking back, Puerling says being a part of Fighting Sioux softball has been a rewarding experience and it's impossible to define what her most memorable moment would be.

"It's the whole thing.