JMU Softball Earns #7 National Seed in NCAA Tournament

The take-no-prisoners, anyone, anytime, anywhere JMU Softball Dukes won’t actually have to worry about the “anywhere” part of their mantra during the next two weeks. That’s because when Coach Mickey Dean’s squad earned the #7 national seed overall in the NCAA Softball Tournament. In turn, that means they will not only host a double-elimination regional this coming weekend like last year, but if they can advance out of the group that includes opening opponent Princeton plus North Carolina and fellow VA-public Longwood, they would ALSO HOST the winner of the Baton Rouge regional (yup, that Baton Rouge) in the “Harrisonburg SuperRegional” in a best of three series on Memorial Day weekend for the right to advance to Oklahoma City for the College World Series.

First, the regional presents a tantalizing opportunity for the Dukes to advance as the pretty solid favorite and quite a few storylines. The first game against the Ivy League champs Princeton is definitely a break for the Dukes in the regionalization of the first rounds as the #7 Dukes catch one of only two teams in the tourney with a sub-.500 overall record. If they can beat the Tigers, they’ll face two teams that were on the schedule this year but the Dukes never actually played through two crazy circumstances. First, the Tarheels tried twice to make the trip to the ‘Burg but were literally “smoked out” by the wildfire that terrorized the Shenandoah Valley a couple weeks ago. The snobs in Chapel Hill won’t get off that easy! Of course, we’d almost forgotten till this bravo tweet from @LancersBlog that the Dukes made a VERY quick rainout call, thus avoiding a matchup with Longwood on a day it never actually rained, earlier this season.

@JMUsportsblog will there be "rainouts"

— LancersBlog (@LancersBlog) May 16, 2016

IF, and that’s said with all the usual playoff caveats, the Dukes could get through this weekend, and IF the seeds hold, none other than the LSU Tigers would be forced to leave the bayou and travel north to the Valley for a best-of-three Super Regional. This Memorial Day weekend extravaganza would be both the largest-ever celebration of purple and gold and easily the greatest softball tailgate competition in the history of the known world. (And we’re extremely confident no one, and we mean no one, can EVER out-tailgate JMU in the ‘Burg).

So despite the fact the ESPNU haters mentioned that “the Dukes avoided the SEC” (JMU beat tourney-participants Auburn and Tennessee by run-rule) and that they failed to mention the Dukes absolutely wrecked the vaunted PAC12 with wins over tourney teams from Arizona, Arizona St., and Oregon, we can’t wait to see what the Dukes do in beautiful Veterans Memorial Park over the next two weekends.

And if you haven’t figured out the Jailyn Ford/Jimmy Chitwood similarities yet, you just aren’t paying attention.

Go Dukes!