Florida, Alabama lead way in SEC's challenging softball parity
From the beef ribs and beans at County Line Barbecue to the early-summer humidity that clings like a young child to a parent on the first day of school, Oklahoma City in June should feel like a home away from home for visitors from places like Louisiana, Alabama and Florida. Yet as welcoming as the host city of the Women's College World Series always is to its familiarly football-loving, iced-tea-drinking guests from the East, the capital city of the Sooner State has invariably proved unkind to Southeastern Conference softball teams.
And in college softball, Oklahoma City remains the gateway to empire.
So yes, it's true that in opening this season -- which officially begins Thursday -- ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, Florida and Alabama are proof of how far a conference has come in just 12 seasons of softball. But it's also true that finding both schools still in search of the conference's first national title is a reminder why the debate over the SEC's place as an emerging superpower stirs emotions like few other topics in the sport.
The oft-told joke always was that other conferences could stage their conference tournaments, but the Pac-10 didn't need one; it held its version on the big stage in Oklahoma City. Even last year, as talk of parity picked up steam, it was news that a mere three Pac-10 teams reached the World Series, marking only the second time in 11 years that fewer than half of the final eight didn't come from the conference.
There have been occasional invaders, beginning with Texas A&M and Cal State Fullerton more than two decades ago. Oklahoma's title in 2000 shook things up, and Michigan's title in 2005 marked the first national championship for a school from the "other" side of the Mississippi River. Even Fresno State's 1998 championship offered a reminder that the Pac-10 has always had competition in its California cradle.
But 21 times in 27 seasons, the national championship went to the Pac-10. All told, the league's eight softball members have a combined 75 WCWS appearances. The rest of the nation has 141.
There might have been occasional pillaging, but the empire has never been seriously threatened. At least until now.
There was softball in the Southeast before there was softball in the Southeastern Conference. South Carolina, for example, celebrated its 35th season of softball in 2008 and reached both the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) and NCAA World Series. But the modern era began in 1997 when, following on the heels of the success of women's sports in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the SEC officially jumped on the softball bandwagon.
Among the debuts that season were Alabama and Florida.
Pat Murphy was on hand at the creation, having joined the Alabama staff as an assistant for its first two seasons and then taking over the head-coaching job -- which he still holds -- in July 1998.
"We always said it would be like every other SEC sport, like the women's basketball or baseball or even football," Murphy said. "I mean, to be a football coach in the SEC, you've got to be crazy, because every team is good. And in softball, it's almost getting that way."
There were growing pains, to be sure. The Crimson Tide won 39 games in 1999, Murphy's initial season at the helm, and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time. As a reward, they were given a date with UCLA in Los Angeles, where the newbie team and its 33-year-old coach quickly learned how differently the game was played at its championship level.
"I'm pretty sure we were the last at-large team, because we were the No. 6 seed at the No. 1 seed," Murphy said of what was then a 48-team tournament with eight six-team regionals. "We were just happy to be there, but we got shut out twice.
I mean, to be a football coach in the SEC, you've got to be crazy, because every team is good. And in softball, it's almost getting that way.
--Alabama coach Pat Murphy
"And as a coach, my favorite play at the time was a three-run homer, and we had several opportunities to either move runners up or play small ball and we didn't. And it cost us, and we went home in two and didn't score a run.
"So that next year, we won 56 games, went to the World Series and it was kind of our coming-out party. But it was a big difference between the two teams in terms of execution, small ball, stealing bases -- just the whole game instead of the power game."
By the time Tim Walton was hired as Florida's coach before the 2006 season, the conference had grown more competitive, both internally and externally. Murphy's Crimson Tide won the conference's first World Series game in 2000. LSU won two games the following season, including one against defending champion Oklahoma. And by 2006, Tennessee had emerged as one of a handful of championship favorites, behind the pitching of Monica Abbott.
Softball had become an increasingly big deal in the ultracompetitive SEC, leading a program such as Florida to go out and find an up-and-coming talent such as Walton (and in the past few years, leading programs such as Tennessee, Arkansas and LSU to build new stadiums). An assistant on Oklahoma's championship team, Walton came to Gainesville after making quick work of turning around Wichita State. What he found was a dream mix of institutional support and an administration willing to acknowledge it didn't know best.
As Walton put it, "Looking at it from the standpoint of what we're doing here … my administration really fed on me and asked me 'What do we need to do to be successful?' And when you have that as a coach, you go, 'OK, we need one of these, two of those and three of these.'"
None of this necessarily distinguishes the SEC from the Big 12, which has a much longer and more decorated softball history to call on, or even the Big Ten, which has both more championships and more appearances in the championship series. What makes the SEC a more compelling candidate to challenge the Pac-10 from top to bottom on an annual basis are the natural resources that had previously been laying dormant.
Global warming aside, it is always going to be difficult for Michigan or Nebraska to play home games or consistently practice outside early in the season. Likewise, it's always going to be a challenge for potential recruits in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and elsewhere to play as many games or practice as much as those in Arizona and California.
That's simply less often the case for softball in Florida and large parts of most SEC states.
While Tennessee relied heavily on Californians such as Abbott and Lindsay Schutzler when it came within a game of winning a championship in 2007, Alabama opens this season with one Californian, two Texans and a bunch of kids from its backyard. And while Florida's roster has its share of California imports, it also features nine Floridians, including six of the 11 players who made up Walton's past two recruiting classes.
As evidenced by the Florida-based Gold Coast Hurricanes winning the prestigious Amateur Softball Association Gold National Championship in youth softball last summer (albeit with the assistance of Connecticut prep phenom Rachele Fico, who will stay in the area to attend LSU next season), the talent pool feeding the SEC could become its biggest weapon.
"I've done camps and clinics in Florida even well before I got here," Walton said. "The level of talent that you're seeing in the Southeast, especially in Florida, is that you're not only seeing the raw athletes now, you're seeing some kids that have experience playing softball at the higher levels. That's been one of the bigger differences in the Southeast. We've always had athletes; they just might have been playing other sports, doing track or doing soccer or playing basketball or doing other things. And now you're seeing a lot more kids that are taking the time to learn how to play the game of softball."
To which proponents of the Pac-10 will just shrug and point to the conference's trophy cases, restocked the past three seasons by Arizona and Arizona State after Michigan's win that was supposed to signal the dawn of a new era of national parity.
Maybe East-West power sharing is inevitable, moderates would concede, but it's not here yet. And when June rolls around, Oklahoma City might still look like Pac-10 country.
It's an argument-clincher, and the only counter will have to come courtesy of Florida, Alabama or another SEC team on the field at Hall of Fame Stadium.
"I think it would really put a stamp on our conference that we do play good softball and we're capable of capturing the biggest championship," Murphy said. "The first one is going to be the toughest, for sure, obviously. … And I think once someone wins one, it'll be easier the next one and then the next one.
"Hopefully this will be the year."
Graham Hays covers softball for ESPN.com. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.
