Lonni Alameda looks ahead to challenge of building 2023-24 team

Lonni Alameda is encouraged as she looks ahead to the challenge of building next season’s Florida State Seminoles squad.

While her team ran into a buzzsaw in the Oklahoma Sooners at the Women’s College World Series finale, the challenge now becomes getting back to the dance and getting over the hump. With the wounds still fresh, Alameda elaborated on how she’s already prepared for the grind.

“Yeah, I mean, there’s always expectation,” stated Alameda. “Of course, last year expectation was to get past regionals. That was the goal, right? Here we are. We just blossomed in an environment. You never really know as a coach what you’re doing that actually clicks. But we’ve been pretty good at building teams to flourish at the right time. I would say that’s to our entire staff. So I think it’s a collaborative effort.

“We get home, we do a good job of dissecting the season. We’ll go through it, what was good, what wasn’t good, how can we be better, how do we get better. How do we put that game plan into place September, October, November.”

Continuing, the Seminoles skipper explained what she’ll be looking to focus on moving forward, and how she’s preparing incoming freshman for pivotal roles.

“Replacing the innings that Kat gave us will be tough. Replacing what Mack gave us towards the end is going to be tough. We’re going to have some rookies. It’s going to take some time to get people in experienced situations,” explained the Florida State leader. “You look at what our returning pitching staff is right now, it’s going to be very young. We have some offense coming back, they’ll know what this feeling is like, but we’ll have to endure figuring out what the pitching staff can do. That’s probably going to be something we figure out how we do that February, March, to be able to bring it together for another run at the end of the season.

“After that I think we have some really talented freshmen coming in that have been texting every single day. Even though they’re not here, they are getting videos from me of like, this is what it’s like when we get here. We’ve got the dream of where we want to be with the new ones coming in. It’s just going to take work. The circle is probably one of the biggest things we really have to figure out.”

Alas, Lonni Alameda and Florida State have no reason to hang their head, and they’re certainly not doing so. The Seminoles will be a force once again next season under her guidance.