OKLAHOMA CITY — In 1982, Dot Richardson powered UCLA to college softball’s first national championship. Those Bruins launched the Pac-10’s domination of the sport. UCLA or Arizona won every national title from 1988 to 1997 until another West Coast power, Fresno State, finally snapped the streak. Cal, Arizona State and Washington later added national championships to the Pac-10’s trophy case.
“There was a dominance in the Pac-10 that ignited the growth of softball,” Richardson, a shortstop for the Bruins named NCAA Player of the Decade for the 1980s, said. “It was the example for other conferences to compete against.”
This Women’s College World Series officially ended that era and ushered in another — the arrival of the SEC Death Star, primed to lord over softball and the WCWS for years to come.
“The [Pac-]12 started softball, really,” Oklahoma’s Patty Gasso, who has coached the Sooners to seven national titles this millennium, said. “It was always UCLA and Arizona. They’re the stepping stones that led to other teams. … The idea of them dissipating the Pac-12 is really hard for me to fathom because of the history of softball. … I don’t know, I’m sentimental over that.”
Because of football-driven conference realignment, the Pac-12 played its final softball game Monday, as Texas eliminated Stanford.
Texas, the No. 1 overall seed, will face Oklahoma for the national championship beginning Wednesday (8 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN+) in a best-of-three series. The second-seeded Sooners will be going for an unprecedented fourth consecutive national championship.
Next season, Oklahoma and Texas will play in the SEC, which, for the fourth time since 2017, had all 13 programs that compete in softball qualify for the NCAA postseason. SEC programs also had eight of the top 16 seeds, not including the Sooners and Longhorns.
The latest round of conference realignment destroyed the Pac-12 and positioned the SEC to reign supreme over softball, potentially unlike any conference over a single sport.
“It’s gut-wrenching, to be honest,” Arizona interim athletic director Mike Candrea, who won eight national titles and 1,674 games with the Wildcats to become the sport’s winningest coach, said. “We’re living in a world now that’s completely different.”
Both Richardson and Candrea saw the change coming long before Texas and Oklahoma bolted the Big 12 for the SEC. Over the years, blue-chip recruits have gradually migrated from California to ascending programs like Oklahoma. The Sooners have eight players from California on their roster, including All-American senior shortstop Tiare Jennings (San Pedro, California), who is third in NCAA history with 97 career home runs.
Off its three straight national titles, Oklahoma also unveiled Love’s Field this spring. The $48 million stadium seats 4,200 and boasts a 10,000-square-foot indoor training center. Many of the other premier softball facilities now reside in the SEC.
UCLA, meanwhile, despite its 12 national championships, plays in a stadium that hasn’t been renovated since 2005 and seats only 1,300.
“A Pac-12 coaching staff told me it’s not as easy anymore, because [recruits] look at facilities, and what do I get? You look at NIL, and what do I get?” Richardson, now the head coach at Liberty, said. She added that the SEC began to seriously invest in softball after Michigan became the first program east of the Mississippi River to win the national title in 2005. “You started to see the SEC starting to raise its development and facilities. So a lot of California and Arizona and West Coast athletes started to come east. And they came east because of the commitment to the sport of softball, by facilities as well as staff salaries, coaching staffs and commitment that was being made.”
Recruiting for the former Pac-12 schools won’t get any easier. UCLA, Oregon and Washington will have to sell players on playing in the Big Ten cold, with road trips collectively totaling thousands of miles. Pac-12 players, such as Paige Sinicki, the first Gold Glove Award winner in Oregon history, have already balked at this predicament.