ATHENS, Ga. — Prior to the last eight games of the season, Clemson was hitting the softball as well as anyone in the country. Six times in an eight-game stretch, they scored six or more runs, while winning seven of those eight games.

Then came the Duke series. The Blue Devils’ pitching shut down the Tigers twice in the three-game series, and it seemed as if Clemson never recovered, including Sunday’s loss to Georgia in the Athens Regional Finale at Jack Turner Stadium.

For the second time in the regional, the Tigers were shutout, this time 5-0, as they had no answer for Georgia pitcher Addisen Fisher. The righty limited Clemson to two hits in a complete-game performance.

Clemson (34-22) scored just seven runs in the four games this weekend and three times in the last six games it failed to score at all.  

“Offensively, it is no secret we struggled to hit in the last month,” Clemson head coach John Rittman said. “We are going to go back and re-evaluate some things we do as a program and get a better plan of attack.”

The Tigers’ Achilles heel this weekend was at the bottom of its lineup. They were a combined 7-for-41 or .171 in the four games of the Athens Regional.

“It starts individually with each hitter and how we dissect their swings,” Rittman said on what the coaching staff must do to fix his team’s hitting issues. “We will look at some fundamental and mechanical things and make sure that we are doing things right for each individual’s swing.

“Hitting is a very difficult skill. I think it can go well, and when it is going well, it is very contagious. The same thing, if it goes bad it can go in the opposite direction.”

Clemson was also facing really good pitchers like Fisher, too.

“We faced some really good pitchers coming down the stretch,” Rittman said. “So, we will go back and re-evaluate our off-season program, the weight room, our conditioning, and some swing mechanics for each individual hitter.”

As for the returning players like Macey Cintron, they have to work at it too.

“It is not fun to lose, and I think that emotion that you show, shows you care,” she said. “You know you can be better. I just like to sit with it a little bit and know the feeling.

“I don’t want to have it again, so how do I go back to work. How do I take my team, a young team, under my belt and how do we get better next year? It is no secret we need to get better. Today was a tough game. How do we get better from it. You can sit with it for a little bit, but you can’t dwell on it. You have to move on. I think failure teaches you a lot and it leads to success, so I just think that is the main takeaway from today’s game.”

The Tigers will have the whole offense to think about it and come up with a plan to fix it.