The West Florida softball team put together come-from-behind wins against Florida Tech on both days of the NCAA South Super Regional in 2019, sending the program to the NCAA Championship for the second time in three years.
 
Facing a 1-0 deficit heading into the sixth inning – the fifth consecutive game the Argonauts have been tied or trailing in the sixth – UWF scored seven runs over the final two frames and took a 7-1 win over FT.
 
"I think this team believed the whole game," head coach Ashliegh McLean said after the game. "They weren't panicked, they weren't uptight, they were having fun and take different approaches. Grace (Gilbert), she threw a heck of a game. She knew her team would score for her – it was just a matter of time." 
 
Florida Tech scored in the bottom of the first, but momentum shifted West Florida's way immediately after. Gilbert induced a 6-3-2 triple play to extinguish the threat, with some heads-up play from Ally Merrill after getting a clean throw from Mika Garcia for the first two outs – Merrill then threw home to Jacquelynne Poling, who applied the tag and finished the play.
 
From there, Gilbert was nearly perfect. She retired the next 10 batters she faced and allowed just two hits the rest of the way.
 
West Florida capitalized on two Florida Tech errors in the top of the sixth, and UWF tied the game on a suicide squeeze by Kathleen Smiley to score Rhiannon Sassman. After the Argonauts loaded the bases later in the inning, it was a bases-clearing, three-run triple from Gilbert that gave UWF a 4-1 lead.
 
"We never got down at all," Sassman said. "We knew we were going to adjust at some point. It took a little longer than we wanted, but we knew it would happen."
 
UWF tacked on three more runs in the seventh, with RBIs from Poling and Merrill to stretch the lead to 7-1.
 
Gilbert finished off the game by inducing a 1-6-3 double play and then getting a groundout back to the circle in the seventh. She finished the weekend with a 0.00 ERA over 10 innings, allowing FIT to hit just .152.
 
With the victory, West Florida became the fourth program since 2017 to reach the NCAA Championship twice in that three-year period.