College News: Could the Women’s College World Series Still Be Played This Year?

As we all too painfully know, on Thursday the NCAA released the following statement cancelling all remaining winter and spring championships for 2020:

Today, NCAA President Mark Emmert and the Board of Governors canceled the Division I men’s and women’s 2020 basketball tournaments, as well as all remaining winter and spring NCAA championships. This decision is based on the evolving COVID-19 public health threat, our ability to ensure the events do not contribute to spread of the pandemic, and the impracticality of hosting such events at any time during this academic year given ongoing decisions by other entities.

NCAA cancels remaining winter and spring championships: https://t.co/qzKAS4McEI pic.twitter.com/G6XreZx35E

— NCAA (@NCAA) March 12, 2020

On Friday, the Associated Press published an article detailing how the NCAA looked at the basketball championships and considered alternatives to cancellations in an article published Friday titled: Inside NCAA’s attempt to save March Madness.

While the piece focuses mostly on basketball, 14 paragraphs in the topic turns to spring sports and an interesting idea is brought up: could spring sport championships be played this year? In the softball world, of course, that would mean the Women’s College World Series.

Here are excerpts from the article with the bold areas added by us for emphasis:

NCAA President Mark Emmert said postponing the (men’s basketball) tournament indefinitely, in the hope of playing it later, also wasn’t feasible.

“The immediate logistical problems were that we had this rapidly, continuing right now, number of schools that were shutting down,” Emmert said. “We had the reality that if you start a tournament six weeks from now a bunch of our students our seniors and will have moved on. And when you looked at the projections of where the virus was going to be in six weeks it looks worse, not better.”

Similar reasoning went into the cancellation of all spring championships, including sports such as baseball and softball with national tournaments that don’t start for another two months. It was a move that surprised some athletic administrators.

But with hundreds of schools closing campuses, some through the semester, and conferences suspending athletic activities, the NCAA could have faced the possibility of holding national championships in sports where many of the usually participants were not fielding teams.

Emmert said he was open to reconsidering spring championships.

“If I have learned anything from this it’s to be reminded to never say never,” Emmert told AP. “And so the answer to that is of course the board and everyone else will consider anything that makes good public policy sense. Those decisions are going to be driven by medical science and there would have to be a very clear, unequivocal, all-clear determination by public health officials and our advisory panel. Sitting here today that’s very hard to imagine.”

It’s a long-shot, of course, but who would have thought just days ago that the college and high school softball seasons could be cancelled?

Right now, to refer to a famous line from the movie Dumb & Dumber, when it comes to the possibility of the WCWS be played this summer, we’ll take any chance we can get: