Kaitlyn Terry will play in Sunday’s elimination game.
But not as a Bruin.
Terry spent her first two collegiate campaigns with No. 8 seed UCLA softball (53-9, 20-4 Big Ten) before transferring to No. 11 seed Texas Tech (58-8, 21-3 Big 12) ahead of the 2026 campaign, announcing her departure on June 4, 2025. The junior southpaw/utility will face her former team on Sunday afternoon in a Women’s College World Series elimination game at Devon Park.
“We always say, ‘Nine on one,’ so in our dugout, it’s all of us against them,” said redshirt freshman infielder Aleena Garcia after the Westwood squad bested No. 5 seed Arkansas on Friday night.
The former Bruin sustained just her second circle loss of the season against No. 7 seed Tennessee on Saturday, when the Volunteers earned a walk-off victory in the ninth inning off infielder Emma Clarke’s solo home run, marking just the 18th four-bagger Terry has forfeited this season across 138.2 innings pitched.
Despite her recent blunder, Terry has flourished throughout her first season in Lubbock, Texas – both in the circle and at the plate.
The Glendale, Arizona, local boasts a career-low and team-low 1.67 ERA, the first time Terry has achieved a sub-two ERA across her three-year collegiate career. The southpaw’s feat is made even more impressive given that she has outpaced fellow pitcher NiJaree Canady – a USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year Top 3 Finalist – in terms of their respective ERAs, since Canady holds a 1.74 mark.
And Terry surrendered just three hits and struck out four opposing batters despite allowing the walk-off solo blast Saturday.
But her plate approach may be more impressive.
Terry has a team-high .448 batting average, which is also the 24th-highest clip in the country. The UCLA transfer recorded a .257 hitting clip in her final campaign with the Bruins last year, striking out 26 times as well. The pitcher/utility has cut her plate strikeouts down to 14 this year.
The Big 12 Player of the Year departed Westwood alongside fellow Bruin transfer Addisen Fisher, who committed to Georgia just two days after Terry announced her move to Texas Tech.
The pitching duo was part of a UCLA staff that held WCWS opponents to 10 runs across three contests last year. Terry notched a complete-game performance in the Westwood squad’s first game of the tournament, when UCLA walked off Oregon 4-2.
But Terry failed to notch a single hit at the 2025 WCWS, going 0-for-10 in the Bruins’ brief three-game tournament run.
Terry’s WCWS plate struggles seemingly persisted across her first two hitting outings at the 2026 national tournament, since the left-handed batter snapped her seven-game hitting streak with an 0-for-3 performance against Tennessee and only recorded one hit in Texas Tech’s first WCWS game.
Still, the then-underclassmen tandem’s departure left a substantial void in the Bruin pitching staff entering the 2026 season.
Senior pitcher Taylor Tinsley took the mantle.
“I like challenges, and I wouldn’t necessarily say I like failure, but I like challenges because it gives them that strength, and we call it growing armor,” said coach Kelly Inouye-Perez after UCLA’s run-rule victory against Arkansas on Friday. “They build it … so when they get to this point (the WCWS), they’re a little more prepared to be able to figure out how they’re going to respond.”
Mirroring the Bruin ace’s super regional slate, Tinsley has pitched every inning of the Bruins’ WCWS run thus far, blanking Arkansas on Friday night to anchor the 11-0 run-rule victory.
The Bruins brought in a duo of transfers in pitchers sophomore Brynne Nally and redshirt junior Sydney Somerndike, along with freshman southpaw Natalie Cable, to address the squad’s pitching gap last offseason.
Nally has the lowest ERA out of the three newcomers with a 5.74 mark.
Somerndike notched her latest outing nearly a month ago, throwing 0.2 innings in the Bruins’ Senior Day victory against Oregon on May 3.
Cable has yet to pitch in the NCAA tournament, and Nally threw just 2.2 frames in UCLA’s first regional contest.
Tinsley has lacked a counterpart, or two, in the Bruins’ 2026 campaign.
And the pitcher that coach Inouye-Perez would have run out to the circle to ease the pressure off Tinsley last season will likely challenge the UCLA lineup Sunday.
Comments are closed.