Inside Pitch: With Super Regionals Starting Today, Softball Great Jessie Warren Reflects on Her Noles’ Magical Playoff Run in 2018

Extra Inning Softball contributor Jessie Warren, the All-American infielder for the 2018 National Champion Florida State Seminoles, has been at the highest echelons in the sport.

Her famous spectacular diving catch in the clip below was voted as the ESPN SportsCenter #1 Play of the Day:

Jessie has also been a two-time Cowles Cup champion in the National Pro Fastpitch league (2018, ’19) and also will be playing for the Women’s Professional Fastpitch (WPF) league this year also.

With the 2022 NCAA DI Super Regionals kicking off today–click HERE to read our preview–Jessie takes us back to the wonderful time in her playing career when she made it to that stage of the playoffs and shares her memories of those times including a Super Regional battle against LSU that wasn’t decided until two in the morning!

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The post season is the best part of season. It’s the time where it’s the most thrilling, where everything is high energy and high emotion. It’s a thrill ride and is is personally my favorite time of the year to reminisce about!

With that being said, I want to take you back down memory lane, to my postseason in 2018 including our epic battle in the Super Regional.

We started off hosting Regionals and had Auburn, Jackson State, and Kennesaw State in our regional. We beat JSU 8-0 in 5 innings and had a tough game against Auburn the next day. That game was emotionally, physically and mentally draining.

It went into eight innings with Carsyn Gordon hitting a walk-off inside-the- park home run. Alyssa Rivera for Auburn dove down the line and missed the ball and Carsyn was fast enough to get all the way home to win it for us.

We then played Jackson State in the Regional championship and won 10-0. That meant we got to play LSU again for our Super Regional match up. That was a DOGFIGHT!

LSU took Game 1, 6-5, but I remember none of us were upset because, the year before, we took Game 1 and ended up losing back-to-back so we wanted the Tigers to feel what we felt the year before.

In 2017, after winning Game 1 and thinking we had it in the bag, our opponent came out and they took Game 2. Well, in 2018, we had some bad weather that was going to hit us on Sunday, May 27^th when our second game was to be played, so the NCAA ended up scheduling a double header for the If Necessary game if we won that first game.

We knew it wouldn’t be easy and LSU wouldn’t go down without a fight.

LSU scored first in the bottom of the 2nd inning, but we ended up scoring four that next inning. In the top of the 5th inning, we scored another one to make it 5-1. I remember LSU loading up the bases and Shemiah Sanchez hit a grand slam to tie the game up. That Super Regional game stayed 5-5 until the 11th inning, when we had two home runs to go ahead 8-5 and eventually take the win.

I remember after that game, we just had this energy that we had never had before, which told me we had momentum going into that third game—and it didn’t start until almost midnight!

In 2017 we had watched LSU dogpile on our field and celebrate winning to go to the World Series. They brought their own music and flags and that really ticked us off. We wanted to make sure that wasn’t going to happen again.

Game 2 of that day was still high energy, even though the game moved into the early hours of the morning, and we scored three runs in the bottom of the 3^rd to take the lead. LSU scored one in top of the 5^th, but that that would be all the runs to cross the plate that game which ended at almost 2 am!

We had done it… we came back from being down one game to win the next two and move on.

ith all the excitement that was at our hands, we still had the World Series to play… and that’s a whole different story for another time!

I think when it comes to post season there’s so much energy and emotion but the mindset is that you’ve got to trust all the work that you put in from the start in the fall.

Something I loved that “Coach A” (FSU Head Coach Lonni Alameda) would always tell us was to be silly and have fun in between pitches but—once that pitcher is on the mound—it was time to lock in to the next pitch, so that we aren’t playing two hours of a softball game mentally, but really just around 45 minutes.

Happy post-season to the teams and players battling this week to live their dreams and make it to the World Series!

— Jessie