Minnesota's road to Women's College World Series starts in Seattle
The Minnesota Golden Gophers will open play in the NCAA softball tournament Friday against McNeese State and if they win they'll advance to face Washington or Northern Colorado.
Washington, the No. 7 overall seed in the tournament, is the host of the Seattle Regional and therefore is the favorite to advance from to the Super Regionals, which is a best-of-three series May 25-28 between the winners of the Seattle and Baton Rouge regionals with a trip to the Women's College World Series on the line.
LSU, the No. 10 overall seed, is the favorite to come out of the Baton Rouge Regional.
Minnesota and McNeese State will play at 5:30 p.m. CT Friday, May 19. The game will be streamed on ESPN+.
The Gophers went 37-17 during the regular season and finished third in the Big Ten.
While Washington is the favorite in the regional, the Gophers might have the best starting pitcher in Autumn Pease. She finished 24th in the nation with a 1.45 ERA in 52 starts this season and her 203.1 innings pitched was tied for third most in the country.
Pease struck out the fifth-most batters in the nation (256).
McNeese State went 44-14 in the regular season and had wins over Washington and LSU. The Gophers did not play Washington, Northern Colorado, McNeese State or LSU during the regular season.
Neither Minnesota nor McNeese was ranked in the top 25 of the May 9 ESPN.com/USA Softball poll, but the Gophers were ranked No. 25 in the May 8 D1Softball top 25.
Title: Bring Me The Sports co-owner, editor Email: joe@bringmethenews.com Twitter: @JoeBMTN Education: Southwest Minnesota State University Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota Expertise: All things Minnesota sports Nelson has covered Minnesota sports for two decades, starting his media career in sports radio. He worked at small market Minnesota stations in Marshall and St. Cloud before joining one of the nation's highest-rated sports stations, KFAN-FM 100.3 in the Twin Cities. There, he was the producer of the top-rated mid-morning sports show with Minnesota Vikings announcer Paul Allen. His radio experience helped blossom a career as a sports writer, joining Minneapolis-based Bring Me The News in 2011. Nelson and Adam Uren became co-owners of Bring Me The News in 2018 and have since more than tripled the site's traffic and launched Bring Me The Sports in cooperation with the Sports Illustrated/FanNation umbrella. Nelson has covered the Super Bowl and numerous training camps, NFL combines, the MLB All-Star Game and Minnesota playoff games, in addition to the day-to-day happenings on and off the field of play. Nelson also has extensive knowledge of non-sports subjects, including news and weather. He works closely with Bring Me The News meteorologist Sven Sundgaard to produce a bevy of weather and climate information for Minnesota readers. Nelson helped launch and manage the Bring Me The News Radio Network, which provided more than 50 radio stations around Minnesota with daily news, sports and weather reports from 2011-17.