Junior Chelsea Troupe is the team's number one hitter as well as one of the best in C-USA. She leads not only the team, but the league in slugging percentage (.809), RBIs (20) and home runs (8). UTEP takes on Marist this weekend for a four-game series at the Helen of Troy Softball Complex. (Image: Jeff Taylor)

EL PASO, Texas – The UTEP softball team is back home after a two-week long road trip, and they will take a break from conference play to take on Marist College in a four game series at Helen of Troy Field.

UTEP (12-12, 1-2 C-USA) is coming off their first conference series, where they finished 1-2 against the University of Central Florida. Despite losing the series, the Miners’ offense is leading the conference in slugging percentage (.419), runs scored (127), RBIs (109), doubles (35) and total bases (262).

Junior Chelsea Troupe is the team’s number one hitter as well as one of the best in C-USA. She leads not only the team, but the league in slugging percentage (.809), RBIs (20) and home runs (8). Even though her stats are impressive, Troupe doesn’t care about her stats; instead she sets her expectations high for herself.

“I actually don’t look at my stats, so after I saw my stats on the website I was pretty impressed with myself,” Troupe said. “I guess I do set my expectations a little higher.”

Troupe links the offensive success to players doing their jobs and the team being able to string hits together.

“We were getting hits, getting on base, but actually coming together and hitting in-a-row,” Troupe said.

Despite their offense being able to produce, UTEP has struggled at times with their defense. The Miners defense has made costly errors in games that have cost them.

Head Coach Kathleen Rodriguez attributes errors to the game speed that the younger players have had to adjust to since there are a total of nine freshmen and one sophomore on the team this season.

“It’s a huge learning curve; the speed of this game is night and day compared to anything they have ever done in the past,” Rodriguez said. “I think that’s the biggest thing. We are going to take our licks for a while until we all figure it out, but by the time it’s all said and done, we are going to be pretty darn good.”

Even though the team is young, they manage to have a .500 overall record. This puts them in an okay position at this point in the season, especially with all of the injuries they have had to overcome thus far.

With the team being so young, they look from motivation from one another to light a fuse and get themselves going.

“What we do is we have either a coach or one of the girls who will come up and we will kind of have a little pep talk and try and fire ourselves up,” senior Kia Moore said. “We just look for anything to start a fire.”

UTEP is going to get a lot more motivation playing at home, where they have not played in two long weeks. The Miners are going to welcome in a Marist squad who is looking to win four in El Paso.

Marist (10-9) is playing better softball as of late, after starting the season off with a 0-6 record. Since their start, the Red Foxes have won 10 of their last 13 games and are coming off a sweep of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Marist is led by junior utility play Megan Lamoureux, who is hitting .412 on the season. She has 14 hits with two doubles, one home run and eight RBI. Junior Caitlin Schnell and sophomore Sarah Carmody are the other two hitters on the Marist squad who are hitting above .300. Schnell is currently hitting .333 while Carmody is hitting .313.

This series is crucial for UTEP as they need a big weekend to gain momentum going into the rest of Conference USA play. If the Miners can win this series, it will give the team the confidence they need to finish the season strong.