De Anza College’s softball team aims to finish out the season after forfeiting the last six games of the 2015-2016 season due to grade ineligibility.

“I just want to see us improve as a team and finish the season,” said player Molly Mills, 19, social and behavioral science major. “Not enough people made grades. We have a lot more committed players this year so I think it’s going to be better.”

Coach Megan Kravets said she wants to make sure the players have their grades up to about a 2.5 GPA to ensure a safeguard against grading errors.

“We had some issues last year,” she said. “This year it feels really good. I have more confidence in our team this year. We’re at practice more, and we’re giving more effort.”

Kravets encourages the sport to be family-oriented so players can feel comfortable with each other.

Caitlin Shannon, 21, communications major, said building that trust was hard at the beginning of the season.

“A bunch of different girls didn’t really know each other and then throwing them all together now… There’s a lot of different types of girls and different skill levels on the team,” Shannon said.

Kravets has been with the De Anza athletics program for two years now.

“I think at this point since we basically have been building our program from last year and previous seasons, all of the teams regardless will be our rivals because we want to make sure that we go out there and we do really well,” Kravets said. “We had some close calls last year with teams such as Gavilan and San Jose City and even CSM we had one really good game against them and I think it would be really good for the girls to compete and step up to the level.”

Carina Carrasco, 18, nursing major, said the team needs to improve throwing on the field.

“I think our nerves got the best of us. We know what we did wrong,” said Karina Jacobs, 21, kinesiology major. De Anza lost 12-3 against Cabrillo.

The team had errors early on in the game allowing Cabrillo to put in extra runs.

“Overall, we did really well. It’s just a couple of errors really hurt us,” said Kravets.

Kravets thinks that nerves contributed to the errors, “But you have to get past that and work through it. I definitely think it was an issue, but it shouldn’t have carried through the whole game.”