EUGENE -- The indoor batting cages at Jane Sanders Stadium sit just beyond the foul line in left field, on the bottom floor of a 12,000-square-foot facility the Oregon Ducks call the Team Building.

For softball junkies, the two-year old cages are a dream.



Cameras record everything, and with big-screen monitors mounted on the walls, players can analyze their swing as soon as it's over. Perhaps its best feature, however, is its accessibility. A swipe of a keycard and it's open, anytime.



Ducks junior Jenna Lilley spent hours there this spring before the rest of her teammates arrived for practice, mostly by herself, and other times with assistant Chelsea Spencer, trying to answer the same question: What's going on?



After emerging as one of the country's top hitters as a freshman and sophomore, Lilley has struggled uncharacteristically as a junior, hitting .250 and in the ninth spot in the order entering this weekend's NCAA softball tournament regional at Sanders Stadium.





Lilley's mysterious issues at the plate have been a microcosm of her team's up-and-down results replacing its offensive production from 2016, when UO's attack was one of the country's most potent. The game-to-game inconsistency seen on offense this spring has been an Achilles' heel for an otherwise tough, if inexperienced, team.



Asked to describe Lilley's season, UO coach Mike White veered away from a roller-coaster analogy.

"More of a cliff," he said Wednesday, two days before UO (47-6) opens its regional at 8:30 p.m. against Illinois-Chicago.



"She's always coming in to take extra batting practice and you keep going, 'It's going to click, it's going to click.' It didn't for a long time."



Lilley hit .427 as a freshman in 2015, the fifth-best average in a single season in UO history. Rated the top recruit in the country as a high school senior in North Canton, Ohio, Lilley lived up to the billing, and was named Pac-12 freshman of the year.



As a sophomore, she hit .326, and her RBIs fell from 44 to 33. Compared to her outstanding first season, it marked a regression, but her extra-base hits and strikeout rate tracked the same as her freshman season.



Her issues as a junior, White said, came as a surprise. And so was how long it took to find solutions.



"A lot of time in the cage by myself," Lilley said, "all year."



Searching for fixes, she tinkered with her swing -- maybe too much. Coaches put Lilley at ease in an attempt to allay the problem from turning into an all-encompassing mental block, telling her that whatever she could provide offensively, they would consider it gravy so long as she played excellent defense at third base.



Later, when the tinkering didn't work, they stressed simplicity. Through 132 at-bats Lilley has eight fewer doubles, 10 fewer hits and 12 fewer runs than last season, when she finished with the same number of at-bats.



Lilley and White often discussed her struggles over coffee.



"A lot of coffees," White said.



Such a prolonged stretch of futility "can destroy some players" mentally, White said.



For Lilley, it appears to have led to her long-awaited breakthrough last month.



She is hitting .727 with six RBI in Oregon's last six games, a stretch that has overlapped with a 10-game winning streak that has turned UO into one of the country's hottest teams entering the postseason. UO is averaging 6.8 runs per game during its winning streak, a slight increase over its season average of 6.5.

"I was in the cage one day and something just clicked again and kind of catapulted me into this other rhythm," she said Wednesday.

There's no way to tell which version of Lilley will appear in the postseason -- the Lilley of the past couple weeks, or the one who spent hours in the cages with few results to show for it. White lauded Lilley for continuing to work as hard as anyone on the team at finding a solution, even when results came slowly.

But any signs of progress are welcome. A rejuvenated Lilley gives UO a hot bat at the bottom of the order.



According to White, Oregon tried a little bit of everything to get Lilley going, but throughout it all, coaches repeated the same three pieces of advice. Chase only good pitches, swing on time and on the correct plane.



"I don't know which one has worked for her but I'm not asking questions," White said, laughing. "I'm just going to roll with it."



-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif