The Top 10 Softball Stories of 2023: #8… The Human Experiences (The Painful, Inspirational & Unusual)

By @BruntjensElla

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On of the fun off-the-field stories in 2023 softball is about how he West Virginia baseball team became fans of the Iowa State softball team, pictured here, and vice versa.

We continue our list of the Top 10 Softball Stories of 2023... the list will run daily through Jan. 1, 2024, when we’ll present the top story of the year. The day after New Year’s Day 2024, we’ll recap the Top 10 one last time, as well as note others that were also considered for the list.

In order to compile this Top 10 list, we considered what were the most impactful and relevant stories of the year and which news headlines or feature story or human interest spotlights pertaining to the world of fastpitch softball caught our attention.

Each day, you can also read in full one of the articles we originally published pertaining to that day’s topic.

Previous Top 10 Softball Stories of 2023

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The Unexpected Friendship Between Iowa State Softball and West Virginia Baseball

It’s almost like something out of a television movie, with plot twists and character developments straight from a screenwriter’s notebook.

The social media friendship that has blossomed between Iowa State softball, West Virginia baseball, and the respective fan bases of both programs began, fittingly enough, with a tweet.

In late March, Iowa State senior Lea Nelson was scrolling through Twitter and saw a tweet from ISU’s Barstool account.

“When there is nothing to tweet about sports wise until August because we don’t have a baseball team,” the tweet read, alongside a popular meme.

Nelson, a journalism and communications major, immediately sent the tweet in the ISU softball group chat. While the Cyclones don’t have a baseball team, they do have a softball team, one just two years removed from an NCAA tournament appearance.

A member of that 2021 squad, Nelson tweeted back.

“Well this is awkward,” she wrote.

That’s when things got interesting.

Now, were this actually that television movie, the script could go in several directions at this point. Does the original tweet come with a follow-up apology? Does ISU softball suddenly take the social media world by storm? Does the team get adopted by another school’s fanbase who didn’t even know they needed a softball program to cheer for?

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Among the dozens of replies to Nelson’s tweet, one stood out:

since we don't have a softball team we have decided to be your biggest supporter

— WVU Barstool (@WVUBarstool) March 21, 2023

West Virginia’s Barstool affiliate chimed in, “since we don’t have a softball team, we have decided to be your biggest supporter”.

A nice tweet, a supportive tweet, and that could have been it. But it wasn’t.

“In my head, I was just like ‘they’re probably just using it as clout’,” Nelson said. “But then they were actually supporting us. Whether we won or lost, they were still tweeting at us. We had people in our corner and it was people that we never expected.”

Over the last few weeks, the Mountaineer fan base – led by WVU Barstool, but encompassing a number of West Virginia fans on Twitter – got behind the ISU softball team. Supportive tweets before games, celebratory tweets after wins, encouraging tweets after losses. The unexpected friendship grew.

Last weekend, the Big 12 schedulers unintentionally did the teams a favor. Iowa State softball were down in Stillwater for a three-game series against Oklahoma State’s softball team. Just down the road, the Cowboy baseball team was also home for the weekend, hosting none other than West Virginia in a conference series on the larger diamond.

As Nelson recalls it, it was a member of the Cyclone staff who first realized the irony of both teams being in the same place at the same time.

“Initially, it was just [WVU] supporting us,” Nelson mentioned. “But we were hitting on Friday before our game, and somebody was like ‘oh, did you know that West Virginia was playing here?”

“That is perfect,” Nelson remembers thinking.

The movie script got even better.

Nelson took to Twitter again, halfway-humorously tweeting to the WVU faithful about getting tickets to the Saturday night baseball game. “I didn’t know if we’d actually get tickets,” she said. But the Mountaineer faithful came through. “Parents of players tweeted back and were like ‘we didn’t use our road tickets this week, you guys use those,'” Nelson noted.

On Saturday night, more than two dozen Cyclone softball personnel walked into O’Brate Stadium and took up residence on the West Virginia side of things. Even as they cheered on “their” baseball team, there was only one potential problem:

“It’s funny because that was one of our fears – that we were going to show up and cheer for them and the team would be like ‘why is Iowa State softball here?'” Nelson said with a laugh.

As it turns out, they needn’t have worried. When West Virginia outfielder Landon Wallace hit a home run on Saturday night, he crossed home plate and pointed directly at the ISU softball section, returning the pump-up.

“We said, ‘Okay, they know who we are and why we’re here,'” Nelson said, laughing again.

While OSU fans were less fond of the bond between their weekend opponents – including booing the ISU party at one point during the baseball game, according to Nelson – West Virginia baseball’s win on Saturday and the wild and incredible events of the newfound friendship between teams was quite the adrenaline rush for Cyclone softball.

Entering Sunday’s series finale on the softball diamond, ISU had a renewed energy.

“It felt kind of like Christmas; no one could really sleep,” Nelson said. “I wish you could have been a fly on the wall in our group chat. West Virginia parents were tweeting at us, it was so much fun. But then we were all like ‘at the end of the day, we HAVE to win tomorrow. It’s not an ‘if’; we are going to win.'”

And they did. ISU pulled off a 3-2 win in eleven innings over Oklahoma State, their second win in Big 12 play this season and their second win over the Cowgirls in three years. After the game, the Cyclones boarded their team bus and only one song seemed appropriate for the occasion…

This crossover has been one of the craziest things our team has experienced! Thanks for the love West Virginia. We couldn’t have done it without all of your support 🫶🏼🏔️ @WVUBarstool pic.twitter.com/XAGao5l8UF

— Lea Nelson (@leacj21) April 16, 2023

(That’s John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, the anthem of WVU Mountaineer athletics)

Nelson’s original tweet has more than 2.4 million impressions in less than a month’s time. Teammates who either had doormant Twitter accounts or weren’t even on the platform have become more active on the app and have individually felt the impacts of their newfound fans.

For Nelson, the author of that tweet and the one to whom credit belongs for the entire, incredible saga, what started as some righeous indignation and some fun on social media has other benefits, other meanings.

“A goal of mine, personally, plus our team in general, has been to bring more attention to women’s athletics in general,” Nelson said. “The fact that a simple tweet and friendship with West Virginia can bring so much attention to our program… we’ve gained so many followers of our softball team throughout these last couple of weeks. People who have never watched softball in their lives are now watching our games; one West Virginia fan had the baseball game on his TV and our softball game on his laptop. Bringing so much attention to women’s athletics has honestly been the best part of this all.”

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