For all of Florida's pitching talent, it isn't Kelly Barnhill, Delanie Gourley or Aleshia Ocasio who gets credit for the Gators' move to the No. 1 spot in the national rankings after the NCAA softball season's first week.
The pitcher responsible for Florida's ascension is Washington's Taran Alvelo.
When a player single-handedly reshuffles the pecking order atop the sport, she had a pretty good week. So good, in fact, that after beating both No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 2 Auburn to shake up the polls, and lift her own team into the top 10, Alvelo is espnW's first national player of the week for 2017.
After going 18-7 with a 3.16 ERA as a freshman, Alvelo opened her second season with a start against Auburn at a tournament in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It didn't begin well. Alvelo walked the first batter, allowed that runner to take second on a wild pitch and then walked the next batter. On the verge of working out of the jam, she then allowed her first run of the season on a wild pitch. It would be the only run she allowed against either of last season's finalists.
Alvelo shut out the Tigers (who scored 87 runs the opening week of last season) over the next nine innings. She struck out 13 batters, including reigning espnW player of the year Kasey Cooper, during the 2-1 win. The same Cooper struck out just 15 times in more than 250 plate appearances a season ago.
Alvelo might have been better against the Sooners two days later. The strikeouts weren't there in her third appearance in three days, but she shut out the Sooners without allowing an extra-base hit. All of that against a team that was shut out just once last season, in that case by Minnesota All-American Sara Groenewegen in the first college game for many Sooners.
This performance against the Sooners also came barely an hour after Alvelo held Nebraska largely in check for six innings.
For the weekend, she went 3-0 with a 0.91 ERA and 0.96 WHIP against the toughest competition any pitcher in the country faced.
An Ohio native who is one of the few Washington players from outside the Pac-12 footprint, Alvelo is nonetheless an example of a trend among conference teams -- certainly those in the Pacific Northwest -- to cast a wider geographical net for pitching talent. The long-mighty Pac-12 has been absent from the championship round of the World Series the past several seasons, at least in part because it hasn't had pitching on par with the best of the SEC or programs like Oklahoma and Michigan.
There are a lot of innings still to play this season, and lot for a pitcher like Alvelo still to prove. But a new season was symbolically thrown up for grabs because one pitcher from Washington willed it so.