We didn’t see a lot of upsets during opening week of the Division 1 season. Duke beat LSU, South Alabama toppled Georgia, and Florida Gulf Coast and Nicholls bested UCF and North Texas, respectively. Outside of those four games, though, the bigger storyline of the weekend were some near-misses experienced by top teams. Perhaps no team fell more squarely into that category than Washington, who twice had to play comeback kids against Dixie State, in the Trailblazers’ first-ever game at the Division 1 level. As Week 2 of the D1 season is now upon us, here are five teams who…
Author: jmcleod
Former Wisconsin infielder Taylor Johnson is transferring to North Carolina State, she announced via social media on Wednesday. Johnson entered the portal on January 25th, and made her decision less than a month later. She entered the portal with a graduate transfer designation, and while she will not play in 2021, she will have two years of eligibility remaining at NC State. During the last three seasons at Wisconsin, Johnson served primarily as the Badgers’ starting third baseman. She earned All-Freshman honors from the Big Ten in 2018, and followed that up with nods to the all-conference and all-region first…
Arizona State head coach Trisha Ford won her 300th career game on Tuesday afternoon. While Ford celebrates her milestone victory, here are five fast facts about her that you should know. 1. Ford owns a 141-57 overall record since arriving at Arizona State. Since being hired in June of 2016, Ford has won more than 70% of the games in which she has coached. 2. She is one of the three PAC-12 head coaches to take a team to the WCWS in her second season. In 2018, Ford led the Sun Devils to the Women’s College World Series in just…
New to poll: Oregon State, Tennessee Dropped out: North Texas, Minnesota
Oklahoma freshman Tiare Jennings has been named the JWOS Player of the Week for opening week of the Division 1 season. In her first games as a college softball player, Jennings batted .923 and only recorded one out in thirteen ‘official’ trips to the plate. She collected five home runs and twelve RBIs on the weekend, posting a 2.308 slugging percentage and a .941 on-base percentage. Batting second in the lineup in her first collegiate game, Jennings went a perfect 4-4 against UTEP with three home runs and six RBIs. She was one of four Oklahoma players to record a…
“Adapting and overcoming” is a phrase that Bianca Duran says she uses a lot these days. In addition to being the current mantra for the Louisiana Tech interim head coach, those words could also define the entirety of the Lady Techsters softball program over the last two years. Some twenty-two months ago, in the wee hours of the morning of April 25th, a tornado swept through Ruston, causing damage to various parts of the town and the Louisiana Tech campus. The weather event decimated the program’s baseball and softball facilities, tearing down bleachers; fences; and anything else in its path,…
Week One of the Division 1 season is officially in the books. A lot of tournaments around the country were cancelled due to inclement and winter weather, while just a handful of teams were left to deal with COVID-19 issues. Teams like Tennessee and Alabama made the most of the weekend after their originally-scheduled plans were cancelled, and took on newly-scheduled matchups to get games on the results column after all. Speaking of Alabama, one of the weekend’s early cancellations was the Texas tournament that was supposed to include the Crimson Tide and Arizona. Let’s go By the Numbers as…
The Cal Poly Mustangs opened their season on Friday, but one game is all they’ll play for at least a couple of weeks. After a 3-2 loss to Loyola Marymount in extra innings, the Mustangs announced the cancellation of their next seven games, including three games that had been scheduled for this weekend and four more that were set to take place next weekend. In a press release describing the season-opening loss and announcing the cancellations, Cal Poly said that the games were cancelled “due to a player shortage related to COVID issues around the program,” referring to themselves. Sources…
(Editor’s note: Jayden Mount is a “super senior” infielder at Louisiana-Monroe. She was a Player Blogger for JWOS during the shortened 2020 season and wrote this article, at our request, to offer her thoughts on all that the last year has held. The article has been lightly edited, but is entirely in Jayden’s own words.) On October 2, 2018, I tweeted “One day you won’t lace up your cleats, do your pregame ritual, give your teammate a high five after they score, and you won’t go to practice. One day it will all be over, and you won’t get to…
The countdown to first pitch for the Division I season is ON! Before we get there, though, let’s go out on a limb here momentarily with some Bold Predictions for the year that is upon us… 1. Oregon returns to the Super Regionals >>> The Ducks garner mixed expectations in some softball circles this year, though the general consensus is that the program will continue to get better as their rebound from the disastrous 2019 campaign continues. Haley Cruse is one of softball’s best-known personalities, but what occasionally gets lost in that distinction is her status as one…