SPOKANE, Wash.—The Dons missed some early scoring opportunities, the defense had an off night and had their three-game winning streak snapped as they dropped the West Coast Conference opener 7-0 against Gonzaga on Friday night.
 
Last three or four games, we've been scoring that run to go ahead," San Francisco head coach Nino Giarratano said. "We had three doubles in the first four innings and we didn't score. That hurt us. It's just one more game and we have 26 more to go. Hopefully we can bounce back and play like we're capable of."
 
San Francisco will be back in action on Saturday at 6 p.m. for the second game of the three-game set in Spokane. Christian Cecilio (0-1) will go for his first win of the season.
 
The Dons strung a couple of hits together in the first when Derek Atkinson doubled and Brendan Hendriks singled to set up runners at the corners with two down but Gonzaga got out of the inning on a strikeout.
 
Manny Ramirez, Jr. led off the next inning with a ball that was inches from being a home run and hit off the top of the wall in left for a leadoff double. He moved over to third on groundout by Ross Puskarich but was stranded there.
 
San Francisco had another threat in the fourth and got two on with one out, which included a double from Dominic Miroglio, but a strikeout and a fly out ended the inning.
 
Miroglio has a six-game hitting streak and is 13-for-24 (.541) over that span with seven RBI.
 
The missed opportunities came back to bite the Dons in the bottom half of that inning when Gonzaga put together a rally of its own.
 
With runners at the corners and no outs, Shew got the batter to bounce back to him and he threw out the runner retreating to third for the first out. Cory LeBrun was the next batter and he laced a double into the rightfield corner to bring home run and put Gonzaga up 1-0.
 
A bunt back to the pitcher with no one covering first and a fielder's choice groundball made it a three-run Bulldog lead.
 
Gonzaga capitalized again in the sixth on two USF errors and scored three more in the inning to take a 6-0 lead.
 
Said Giarratano, "We're not going to win when you have two errors and strand runners on base. We need to play way better defense if we're going to be successful."
 
Shew lasted 5.2 innings and allowed six runs, four earned, on 11 hits with six strikeouts. It was his shortest outing since the opening day of the season.
 
"He wasn't as sharp as he needed to be." Giarratano said of the Friday starter. "Shew just didn't pitch as aggressive as he had. Just unfortunate it was at the beginning of conference."
 
San Francisco had scored at least four runs in four of their last five games entering Friday, 5.8 runs per game over the last five, and were 4-0 in those games
 
"I don't think we're going to lose confidence offensively."