As winter sports begin to enter the postseason, many NCAA spring sports have already begun. NCAA softball began the weekend of February 9, and there are already some clear standout athletes and teams. 

Unless another team can find an excessive amount of talent, power, and speed in the next few months, the Oklahoma Sooners will be winning their third straight national championship. The Sooners have only won six total national championships in program history, but five of those six have been in the past decade; I predict their seventh will be recorded in the books this year.

The Sooners are unstoppable, especially when it comes to hitting, but I am curious to see how their stats change after losing powerhouse Jocelyn Alo. Alo set a new NCAA home run record last year after finishing her career with a total of 122 home runs and was the 2021 and 2022 USA Collegiate Softball Player of the Year. Although Oklahoma has lost Alo, the program still has many big-time athletes that will guarantee them success.

Junior Jayda Coleman, senior Kinzie Hanson, and junior Tiare Jennings all gained extra nationwide exposure and playing time after playing on the USA National Team and competing in Japan this past summer. The Sooners have also gained redshirt-senior Alex Storako from the transfer portal this past year. Storako is a successful right-handed pitcher who was previously a part of the University of Michigan before transferring for her final year. She started in the circle at Michigan for twenty-nine of the thirty-eight games she appeared in and ended the season with a total of 300 strikeouts over the 200.1 innings she pitched. These stats are incredible and will be a huge bonus to the Oklahoma team.

While I don’t know much about the Liberty Flames, this team had a humongous game against the Sooners on opening day. The Flames have never been on my radar; I had also never watched them play before this game, but they certainly put up a fight. Playing against the dominant Oklahoma program isn’t the way any team would want to begin its season, but the Flames put in the hard work. Although the score shows that they lost, I see that game as a win for the Flames. They were able to keep the Sooners scoreless in the first seven innings before letting them score in extra innings and only losing the game by a score of 1-0. The team also put up another amazing fight against the number two ranked team of UCLA where they only fell 3-2. With those two games behind the team, I can see a successful future for Liberty University.

The Georgia Bulldogs are off to a great start this season as well. Ranked fifteenth coming into the season, I knew they would prove that they deserved that spot, but I wasn’t expecting to see such a strong team this early. After just five games, the Bulldogs are already standing at an insane run differential of forty. Redshirt sophomore Jayda Kearney contributed to this extreme run difference during the game against the Ohio State Buckeyes where she hit three home runs in one game, with her last being a grand slam. Based on opening weekend, I will not be surprised if the Bulldogs make it far in the World Series. 

I encourage everyone to spend a day or two, or even every day if you enjoy softball the same way I do, watching the intensity of NCAA softball unfold. It certainly will not disappoint.