Memo to all future espnW national players of the week: The trip to Hawaii is not included.

Sorry.

The timing of North Dakota State pitcher Jacquelyn Sertic's ongoing stay in Honolulu is purely coincidental, her team long ago scheduled to travel this week to a tournament in Hawaii while making the most of spring break, but she certainly earned some kind of reward.

Sertic and the Bison travel across the Pacific Ocean to play six games this week, two each against Baylor, California and Hawaii. They have their work cut out for them against teams like that, but events of the past week suggest those teams don't have it so easy, either.

A program that made a habit of playing beyond its weight class since moving to Division I a little more than a decade ago, North Dakota State was at it again as it followed the pitcher's lead in a tournament hosted by Alabama.

In her first start in Tuscaloosa, Sertic allowed four hits, one walk and two earned runs in eight innings to beat DePaul. She topped that a day later when she allowed four hits and one earned run in a win over second-ranked Alabama on its field. She wasn't done. Sertic then threw a five-inning no-hitter as the Bison surged to an 18-0 win over DePaul to wrap up their stay.

That's an extra-inning complete game, the biggest upset of the season and her first career no-hitter.

Eight hits and three earned runs allowed in 20 innings across three starts. All in barely 48 hours.

It adds up to the player of the week.

While DePaul is almost certainly better than its record suggests -- that 3-12 mark at least in part the product of a difficult schedule -- Sertic's signature performance of the weekend was clearly the win against the Crimson Tide sandwiched between wins against the Blue Demons. It was Alabama's first home loss to an unranked team out of conference in almost two years and just its third such loss in the past six seasons.

"Against Alabama, she was on," North Dakota State co-coach Darren Mueller said. "That's obviously one of the best games she's ever pitched."

Not bad for what was supposed to be a cameo. Mueller said he told Sertic before the game that he didn't know if she would pitch to "one batter, one inning or one time through." It was an all-hands-on-deck situation. Keep changing pitchers and hope that Alabama, which had scored 15 runs against the Bison a day before, wouldn't find its footing against any of them.

That message turned out to be the closest he came all day to taking her out.

Sertic wasn't perfect. That she had to go extra innings in the opener against DePaul was in part because of a game-tying home run in the seventh inning. And the game against Alabama ended only after the home team cut the lead in half on a bases loaded walk and still had three runners on base in the bottom of the seventh inning.

But it also says something about what they think of their sophomore that the Bison stuck with Sertic even after the home run by DePaul and even after Alabama started getting runners. It's the kind of thing learned about a pitcher in watching her beat North Carolina and pitch well against Texas and Long Beach State already this season.

This is what North Dakota State does. Some small programs rise briefly to national prominence on the shoulders of a once-in-a-lifetime pitcher. The program from Fargo, by contrast, seems to find an ace it can win with at least once every four years. Sertic settled in behind Krista Menke a season ago, just as Menke did with Whitney Johnson before that. They get their share of strikeouts, they pitch a lot of innings and they get support from well-coached hitters and defenders. Most of the time it goes their way. When it doesn't, they take the ball the next day and try again.

No one did it better this past week. No one more deserves to spend spring break in Hawaii.