What went down in the 10th week of college softball? The aim each week is to bring you five stories that defined the week in college softball or helped teams navigate the long road to Oklahoma City and the Women's College World Series.
1. Mike Candrea second to none (except Carol Hutchins)
All things considered, it's good to be Buzz Aldrin. Like the second human to walk on the moon, Mike Candrea became the second coach to win 1,458 NCAA softball games when No. 16 Arizona clinched its weekend series at Stanford with a win Saturday (he padded his total when the Wildcats completed the sweep Sunday).
That Michigan's Hutchins first set foot on untrod territory, beating Candrea to Margie Wright's mark by weeks, doesn't diminish the feat (especially when it's accompanied by Candrea's eight NCAA championships and Olympic gold medal).
Because so much of college softball history is set against the backdrop of the rest of the country trying to catch up to Arizona and UCLA, it's easy to gloss over the fact that Candrea was the upstart before he was the emperor. With some AIAW success in its past, Arizona wasn't quite a wasteland when Candrea arrived before the 1986 season, but he still inherited a program that was just a handful of games better than .500 in the first four seasons of NCAA competition.
The Wildcats are 1,040 games above .500 during his 25 seasons as coach.
Arizona made the NCAA tournament in his second season. They reached the World Series in his third season. They won a national title in his sixth season and became the first program other than UCLA to win back-to-back titles before he concluded his first decade on the job (it took another two decades for Florida to finally become the third member to the back-to-back club).
With both teams struggling to avoid entering the NCAA tournament unseeded, Arizona and UCLA have more pressing matters than celebrating history when they meet this weekend in Tucson. After giving up 30 runs in three games against the Bruins a season ago with a different pitching staff, Candrea will care more about seeing innings like those provided by Danielle O'Toole and Taylor McQuillin against Stanford. It is nevertheless fitting that the first opportunity for fans in Tucson to recognize all he accomplished in making Arizona a standard of excellence comes against the old rival against whom his teams first had to gain a foothold.
The first two games against the Bruins will be on ESPN2 at 5 p.m. ET on both Saturday and Sunday.
2. The all-time pitching duel you probably didn't see
When Tennessee's Monica Abbott and Arizona's Alicia Hollowell met in the semifinal round of the 2006 Women's College World Series, they brought more than 3,000 combined strikeouts to the circle. Even though Abbott still had a season to play for the Lady Vols, in which she would put the NCAA career record out of reach, a softball diamond has rarely, if ever, been the stage for two such prolific strikeout artists that it was that day.
If that is the gold standard, what occurred Sunday in St. Louis takes silver.
And the event lived up to the numbers.
University of Indianapolis senior Morgan Foley and University of Missouri-St. Louis senior Hannah Perryman have more strikeouts than any other pitchers in Division II or III history, so it's safe to say Sunday's encounter in the first game of a doubleheader was the most prolific strikeout duel ever to take place beyond Division I. And since Abbott and Hollowell are two of only 10 Division I pitchers with more strikeouts than Perryman, and 11 with more than Foley, the game's credentials as No. 2 on the all-time list appear solid.
In a week that was notable for each for other reasons, Perryman in becoming the first Division II pitcher ever selected in the NPF draft and Foley by finally losing a game after a 30-0 start to the season for the top-ranked team, a 3-2 win for Indianapolis was as fun as sport gets. No hype, just strikes.
The only hit Foley allowed was a two-run home run that immediately followed a borderline two-strike pitch that was deemed a ball by the umpire and extended the at-bat. She finished with 18 strikeouts, but it looked as if the one that got away would haunt her until Indianapolis rallied for three runs in the sixth inning on its only three hits of the game against Perryman.
St. Louis handed Foley just her second loss of the season in the second game of the doubleheader, although Perryman got a rare game off in that 2-1 win.
The good news if you missed this one? They may meet again in the conference tournament.
3. Auburn piles on the runs again
Auburn doesn't play a lot of seven-inning games because of the run rule. The nation's most prolific offense often doesn't need to play more than three innings.
After an 8-1 win at UAB that turned out to be its closest call of the week, Auburn scored 54 runs in 15 innings to sweep three games at Arkansas. Of those 62 total runs, the Tigers scored 31 of them in the first three innings. They lead the nation averaging 9.33 runs per game, but they would still rank in the top 30 nationally with just the runs they score in the first three innings.
Senior Jade Rhodes had the batting equivalent of a perfect game when she collected five hits in five innings, including two home runs, en route to six RBIs in one of the wins at Arkansas. Junior Kasey Cooper hit three home runs and drove in 10 runs for the week. Those two alone have driven in 123 runs this season, more than several dozen Division I teams have scored in total.
Those two aren't alone, of course, in a lineup that has now scored 20 or more runs in five games after doing it twice against Arkansas (and 18 runs on three other occasions).
Auburn isn't going to set the NCAA single-season record for runs per game, but its weekend gorging has it back on pace to displace Arizona's 1995 season as the pre-eminent scoring season. (Southern University holds what amounts to the unbreakable Division I record at 14.8 runs per game in 1997, but it played its 32 games that season against essentially just seven opponents). Among major conference teams, Arizona's 8.74 runs per game in 1995 is the mark to beat.
It was a busy SEC week. Kentucky helped its NCAA tournament seeding case at Missouri's expense, LSU claimed a much-needed 12-inning win at Mississippi State. Texas A&M lost a series to Alabama but gained momentum with a run-rule win in the finale. Tennessee's Megan Geer almost singlehandedly clinched a series at Georgia, at least offensively, with matching three-run home runs. But Auburn's runs have it chasing some serious history.
4. Kelsey Stewart hits, Lexie Elkins sits
The work week summed up the seasons to date for No. 1 Florida's Kelsey Stewart and No. 4 Louisiana-Lafayette's Lexie Elkins. The weekend suggested a change in the narrative.
When USA Softball released its 25-player watch list for player of the year during the week, Stewart's name was not included. Though still excellent by most measures (we're talking about someone with a .432 on-base percentage this year), the senior's season has not been as gaudy as the previous three in which she compiled a .417 batting average and 81 extra-base hits.
But as Florida rolled to three wins out of conference against the Ragin' Cajuns, Stewart contributed five hits, four runs and three RBIs. A quarter of her 12 extra-base hits this season came in the team's past four completed games. Florida reaped the benefits of senior pitchers coming on late the past two seasons, first Hannah Rogers and then Lauren Haeger. Given that the team is already No. 1, imagine what's ahead if Stewart is beginning her own senior surge.
On the other side, a week that began with Elkins becoming the first overall pick in the NPF draft concluded with her continued absence through the Florida series because of a thumb injury. The situation is not as dire as the weekend sweep suggests, but both the losses and the lost bat are blows for a team that is losing its grasp on a top-eight seed in the NCAA tournament.
5. Is Nebraska's Knighten better than No. 26?
The rest of the Big Ten wants no part of Nebraska's MJ Knighten. Is their evaluation more accurate than that of voters who didn't include her on their ballot for USA Softball's watch list?
Knighten began the weekend tied for the second nationally in home runs, 12th in RBIs, 14th in slugging percentage and just outside the top 50 with an on-base percentage better than .500, but that resume wasn't enough to place her among the top 25 candidates for the national player of the year award.
She homered off Oregon's Cheridan Hawkins in an upset win earlier this season. She hit a double off James Madison's Megan Good and a home run off teammate Jailyn Ford -- in the same inning. She scored the winning run in a 1-0 win against Michigan, then ranked No. 1. But that resume wasn't enough to place her among the 25 players on the USA Softball list. And beyond boosting her on-base percentage, she isn't getting many opportunities to make her case.
Knighten walked eight times in three games against Northwestern this weekend. Only Penn State's Macy Jones, who is quietly clobbering the ball, has walked more in Big Ten games.
Nebraska got the sweep against Northwestern, recent NPF draftee Kiki Stokes enjoying life ahead of Knighten in the order with three home runs. But is Knighten getting her due?