The NCAA tournament field is official. Sixty-four teams will vie for a spot in the Women’s College World Series and a national championship.
Sunday night’s televised selection show revealed the regional brackets around the country, including teams that earned at-large bids to the tournament and the sixteen host sites.
Oklahoma earned the #1 overall national seed, followed in the seeding by ACC tournament champions Florida State, ACC regular-season champions Virginia Tech, and SEC regular-season and tournament champions Arkansas at #2, #3, and #4, respectively.
PAC-12 runners-up UCLA were seeded at #5, with Alabama, Oklahoma State, and Arizona State rounding out the top-8 seeds. Of course, teams seeded in the top eight are eligible to host both Regionals and Super Regionals should they advance through each round of the tournament.
The remaining seeded teams who will host regionals: #9 Northwestern, #10 Clemson, #11 Tennessee, #12 Duke, #13 Washington, #14 Florida, #15 Missouri, #16 UCF.
Five SEC teams were chosen as top-16 seeds to host Regionals, while four ACC teams, three PAC-12 teams, two Big 12 teams, and one team each from the Big 10 and the American rounded out the group of hosts.
Perhaps the story of the night from a hosting perspective was UCF earning the #16 overall seed, hosting a regional for the first time in program history. 2016 was the last time that a non-Power 5 team hosted a regional, but the Knights will do just that next week. Orlando is one of four first-time host sites in this year’s field; Clemson, Duke, and Virginia Tech will also host a regional at their home ballparks for the first times ever.
The tournament field as a whole is made up of 12 SEC teams – a number that leads all conferences by a large margin. Other represented conferences include seven teams from both the PAC-12 and the Big 10, six teams out of the ACC, three teams from both the Big 12 and the American conference, as well as the 26 automatic qualifiers from the remaining conferences.
Arizona did make the tournament field, doing so handily as they were not even one of the “last four teams in” to the tournament field. The Wildcats were considered a Bubble team entering Sunday night and had not missed the NCAA tournament since 1986. That streak of consecutive postseason appearances will continue.
