What went down in the second week of NCAA softball? The aim each week is to bring you five stories that defined the week in college softball or help navigate the long road to Oklahoma City and the Women's College World Series.
Maryland stuns the country
Weather washed out Saturday games from Tempe, Arizona (average annual rainfall of 8 to 9 inches), to Palm Springs, California (average annual rainfall of less than 6 inches). And yet that soggy state of meteorological affairs wasn't the day's least likely occurrence. Not even close.
Video of the final out of Maryland's 4-2 win over No. 1 Florida tells the story. After the routine groundout, the Terrapins appear unsure what to do next. Some look ready to dive on the ground in a celebratory dog pile. The dugout sounds like people on a roller coaster. Pitcher Madison Martin, by contrast, barely cracks a smile, as if wrapping up a normal day on the diamond.
Martin was one of the day's stars, a redshirt senior who scored the go-ahead run, drove in the final insurance run and then pitched the final 1 2/3 innings for her first save since 2014. But as much as she might have sought to act like she had been there before, she hadn't.
When it comes to upsets on this scale, few have.
Maryland took the field against the Gators winless on the season. More precisely, it stayed on the field for the game against the Gators, having minutes earlier lost to previously winless Florida A&M. In their first eight games, the Terrapins were outscored 67-18. And they faced a pitcher, Delanie Gourley, who alone won more games a season ago than they did.
Florida's only regular-season non-conference losses the past four seasons came against Missouri (then in the Big 12) and Florida State teams ranked in the top 10 at the time. Both losses were in extra innings. Even then, neither opponent managed to score as many as four runs in the regulation seven innings.
But after falling behind 2-0 in the first inning Saturday, Maryland scored three runs in the fourth inning, one more in the fifth inning and held on for a win far less likely than rain in the desert.
Georgia running away with it
Georgia's Cortni Emanuel has stolen more bases through the first two weeks of this season than eight SEC teams. Let that sink in. So while it's tempting to say the younger of Georgia's Emanuel sisters ran amok this past week, what she did is becoming increasingly typical. In a busy week of seven wins for the 12th-ranked Bulldogs, Emanuel batted .632 and stole 10 bases without being caught. That after she batted .500 and stole eight bases the opening week.
How much of a destructive force is she for opponents? Georgia's Alyssa DiCarlo had a strong week of her own and is slugging 1.281 with an SEC-best 41 total bases. But if Emanuel's steals counted toward total bases, she'd have even her teammate and the SEC's best slugger beat.
We've seen something like this before from Emanuel and Georgia, which tends to stay at home in Athens for the season's first couple of weeks and play, let's call it, modest competition. But 18 stolen bases in 12 games is more than a fast start. Only three players since 2000 have stolen at least 60 bases in a season -- Alabama's Brittany Rogers, Mississippi State's Chelsea Bramlett and Georgia's Nicole Barber, who was the last player to reach 70 stolen bases in 2003 (East Carolina's Michelle Ward set the single-season record with 80 steals in 1994). That is the kind of company Emanuel is keeping, the only company that can keep up with her.
The still Ragin' Cajuns
Everywhere you look, once-iconic mid-major programs are struggling to keep up with the big money and big rosters now common in their sports. From Old Dominion in women's basketball to Portland in women's soccer and Fresno State in softball, it's a sign of the times.
Everywhere except Lafayette, Louisiana, where it's business as usual at Lamson Park.
In arguably its most important series of the season, a series that could make or break the opportunity to host an NCAA tournament regional down the road, No. 18 Louisiana-Lafayette bounced back from a disappointing opening weekend to win two of three games against No. 4 Alabama. In front of more than 2,000 fans for each of Saturday's doubleheader and Sunday's series finale, the Ragin' Cajuns outscored their visitors 18-5 in the process.
Time will tell if DJ Sanders, who hit 18 home runs as a sophomore, has the plate discipline to fully follow in the footsteps of so many Louisiana-Lafayette sluggers before her. We'll wait to see if freshman pitcher Alyssa Denham's 13 walks and 10 strikeouts are a point of concern. But there Denham was Sunday, throwing a two-hitter to shut out the Crimson Tide, backed by a pair of home runs from Sanders.
A new season brings new roles and new faces. It's the results that seem to stay the same.
Arizona has that look
Louisiana-Lafayette has been to the Women's College World Series much more recently than Arizona, which just goes to show how difficult it is to stay on top of the sport these days. But the program with 22 World Series appearances and eight NCAA titles looks a little restless.
The weather in Tucson cooperating enough to play six games, No. 11 Arizona swept its opponents by a margin of 58-4. The season total is now 97-10, the most dominant opening two weeks for the Wildcats in nearly a decade. And like Oklahoma a season ago, it's a youth movement at the forefront (or at least sharing the forefront with Katiyana Mauga and Danielle O'Toole). First-year players Jessie Harper, Dejah Mulipola and Alyssa Palomino combined for the week to hit .462 with 31 RBIs and 14 extra-base hits. Mulipola alone drove in 15 runs.
With likely 13 or 14 ranked teams on hand, depending on the new USA Softball/ESPN.com Top 25, this week's iteration of the Mary Nutter Classic near Palm Springs offers no shortage of marquee games. But right at the top of the list is Sunday's encounter between Arizona and Florida State, which is rolling at 10-0 and likely to take over the No. 1 ranking this week.
Last of her line
The aforementioned rain in the Palm Springs area slowed Nicole Schroeder, but it couldn't stop her. Not much has this season. Schroeder and Arkansas had two games washed out in the first iteration of the Mary Nutter Classic, but the Razorbacks still scored 36 runs in wins over Loyola Marymount, Cal State Northridge and San Diego to improve to 7-0 through two weeks.
Already the reigning SEC player of the week after totaling three home runs and nine RBIs in the team's first four games, Schroeder hit three more home runs and drove in nine more runs in the most recent wins. With 40-plus games to play, the redshirt senior is just three home runs and 10 RBIs shy of matching her single-season career highs in those categories.
Having the spotlight to herself was a long time coming for the youngest of four college softball-playing sisters, including former UCLA standouts Jennifer and Katie. The California family is a microcosm of the sport in recent years. Jennifer said not long ago it never would have occurred to her to go to an SEC school when she arrived at UCLA prior to the 2004 season. Though injured, Katie was part of the last Bruins team to win a national title in 2010. Now Nicole is trying to help Arkansas, which went 2-45 in the SEC the past two seasons, rise in the deepest league in the nation.