With 10 games loaded into one week, Iowa softball’s spring break will be a busy one.

Two different teams have emerged in Iowa softball as the season begins: one is aggressive and can compete with any team in the nation, the other is lax, slow, and tentative.

Iowa softball has played two top-10 opponents thus far this season, beating one and lost the other by a single run.

Against No. 8 Baylor, the teams were tied, 1-1, in the seventh inning, with the Hawkeyes led by sophomore Allison Doocy in the circle. Then, head coach Marla Looper called Angela Schneider’s number to pinch hit, and she hit a go-ahead 2-run homer that sealed the 3-1 upset for Iowa.

A week earlier, Doocy pitched another gem, but Iowa was on the wrong side of the scoreboard as they dropped a 3-2 game to No. 4 Texas A&M.

Even if the Hawkeyes compete with the nation’s top teams, their record shows otherwise. The team is only 5-7, despite playing nine games with unranked opponents. The trend seems to show Iowa plays up to ranked teams but down to unranked.

“I can’t stand it,” Looper said. “No matter who we play, it’s the most important game of the season. If they have a number in front of their name or not, I personally don’t care what color jersey the other team is wearing, we should be putting our best foot forward.”

With spring break around the corner for the Hawkeyes, 10 games will give them the opportunity to turn their record around.

“We’re going to have a wide variety of different levels of teams. We need to play at our top potential instead of playing down to teams,” Doocy said. “We have been playing up to teams, but we can’t let ourselves play down against unranked teams. I think we should take in a lot of confidence from what we’ve done. We have a full week of games, so we can get as my wins as we can this week.”

Iowa will head to Phoenix to compete on Saturday through March 12 in the Grand Canyon Invitational, in which it will take on Georgetown twice and Grand Canyon three times. Then, on March 14, the team has a double-header with Arizona State in Tempe.

On March 16 and 17, the team will close out its weekend with two games against Wichita State and a game against Creighton at the Creighton Invitational in Omaha for its second-to-last nonconference set of games.

With Iowa’s first conference game scheduled for March 23, the team will need to adapt to playing competitively in every game.

“Making adjustments throughout a game is no different against a No. 8 Baylor against an unranked Butler or somebody else like that,” Looper said. “We’re going to face that in conference, so we need to get better at it in nonconference.”

Many of Iowa’s losses this season have been by 1 or 2 runs, and Looper sees this falling differently this coming week.