Spring break is supposed to be a time to relax, unwind, spend time with your friends and forget about the pitfalls of winter quarter.

Not if you are a Stanford softball player.

While their friends and classmates were enjoying trips home, or to vacation spots like Mexico and Hawaii, the girls on the softball team and their suddenly cold bats suffered through the beginning of Pacific-10 Conference play here on the Farm.

Many Stanford students returned to school for spring quarter with sunburns, but the softball team was feeling anything but hot. After beginning the season pounding its opponents to the tune of a 33-2 start, Stanford began Pac-10 play with a five-game losing streak, during which its bats looked like they’d been spending time in the permafrost of Antarctica rather than in sunny California.

The Cardinal managed just three runs in five losses to begin the conference season, and the team now faces its potentially hardest challenge: fighting back to the top of the Pac-10 standings.

Stanford got back on the right track this past Sunday when it picked up its first conference victory, a 3-1 dog-fight of a game against Washington in Seattle. But all the Cardinal players know that they will have to play better if they want to be the legitimate title contenders that they seemed to be early on in the season.

Head coach John Rittman is not overly concerned with the team’s play to date.

“We have good leadership within the team, and the upperclassmen really understand the peaks and valleys of Pac-10 play, and they know how every game is a battle,” Rittman said before practice on Wednesday. “As long as we make adjustments, we’ll be fine. A timely hit here or there and we are 5-1, and not 1-5.”

To say that every Pac-10 game is a battle is quite an understatement. Six of the conference’s eight teams are ranked in the top 25 nationally, and unlike non-conference play when the Cardinal often faced sub-par pitching, Stanford is now facing some of the country’s best pitchers every game.

Coach Rittman feels that facing the weaker pitching in non-conference play may have led to some of the struggles early on in Pac-10 play.

“We are facing the best pitchers in the country . . . we need to be more compact,” Rittman said. “Our swings got a little long in the preseason, but now we are facing All-Americans everyday, so we have to get back to developing compact swings and work on just putting the ball in play.”

Sophomore center fielder Alissa Haber broke it down even more simply.

“The team has been pressing a bit, and I think sometimes our minds get cluttered thinking about our swings and trying to do things a certain way,” Haber said. “I think this week we are really working on going up to the plate with a blank slate and going back to the basics of just ‘see the ball, hit the ball.’”

The team will definitely have to do a better job of “just hitting the ball” in timely situations if it wishes to improve.

As coach Rittman pointed out, getting on base hasn’t been the issue. The Cardinal managed 34 baserunners in three games this passed weekend. However, the team managed to score just five of them.

Haber, the team’s leadoff hitter and batting leader, likes the challenge of facing great pitchers every game.

“I like facing the good pitchers more,” she said. “It is a better challenge; there is more riding on each at-bat. I’d rather be facing [Arizona starter] Taryn Mowatt than some no-name from Fordham.”

Still, the team has been tepid against better pitching.

Facing Mowatt — a pitcher that Stanford managed to defeat last season — in the team’s first Pac-10 game was no small task. Not only did the All-American lead Arizona to a national title last year, but she also received an ESPY award as the top female athlete in the country.

Sophomore catcher Rosey Neill feels similarly to Haber, however.

“The pitchers we’ve been facing in Pac-10 play are no different then pitchers from Oklahoma and Florida that we faced earlier in the season,” Neill said.

Haber and Neill definitely feel that the Cardinal still has what it takes to score against the best teams in the nation. Now the onus falls on them to lead Stanford back to its winning ways.