When people think about the pinnacle of college athletics, March Madness and the College Football Playoff (and, to a lesser extent, the other major bowls) come to mind. College football and basketball certainly are, by far, the two most popular college sports, and their respective championships become magnet events for many.
I, however, am here to tell you that these are not the best times to watch college athletes compete.
Late May is the perfect time for watching college sports.
To understand this, first consider the ethos of college sports. What makes college athletics more compelling to many than professional sports? What is it about watching college students that makes us so much more invested in the competition than when we watch professionals?
For some, it is simply a connection to the school. Many watch a school because it is their alma mater or they live in a college town. What drives the connection, especially for residents of a community who have no direct link to a school, is the emotion student-athletes bring with them. This is so much more evident in sports other than football and basketball, where far more of the players are true student-athletes.
Few of the men and women playing college tennis or softball plan to make a living playing their sport professionally. Maybe a handful of athletes per year, at absolute maximum, can become a professional in these sports. Every single player competing in these sports is doing it for a love of the game (or to pay their way through college). It’s not about showing off for a potential professional team or a scout. It is always about pride and a school-inspired love of the game.
We feel this tug of emotion when watching football and basketball. It is ingrained into the nature of college sports, and it always will be. Most of the college players, even the top ones, won’t end up going pro. There is a passion that drives us to watch these sports, a wellspring of youthful excitement which is found a hundredfold in sports where no one is going pro.
The first sport I have to mention, the linchpin that ties all of the May championships together, is college softball. The softball tournament, which starts on Thursday (most games start Friday, but there will be two games on Thursday so that BYU can avoid a potential game on Sunday), brings a passion that is truly only rivaled by March Madness. It is an atmosphere in which teams and schools rally behind a singular desire to win; the 64-team tournament offers a theater of events in which anything can happen.
Yes, the ACC and Pac-12 have historically dominated the sport, with the SEC currently launching itself atop the totem pole. We can ignore the rankings and the odds, though. Sure, by the time we see the final in June, it might be exactly what we expected; the way we get there, though, will be anything but.
I fell in love with the NCAA softball tournament in 2010, when I found the Hawaii-Alabama Super Regional on ESPN2 while randomly flipping through channels. The final ten minutes of that series are on YouTube, and they are a perfect example of why NCAA softball epitomizes the ethos of college sports. Watch it. You won’t regret it.
This had everything. The 16th national seed was a massive but plucky underdog against No. 1 Alabama. The team’s emotionally invested fans traveled all the way from Hawaii to Tuscaloosa to watch their team play in a series no one thought it could win. Hawaii fashioned the rare (and quite amazing) moment of a walk-off home run in its opponent’s house. UH shocked the favored Crimson Tide and their fans, who could do nothing but watch as a towering fly ball barely stayed fair. Do greater things happen in college sports? Sure, amazing moments exist everywhere. This one, though, exemplified precisely what college sports are all about.
The NCAA has helpful and user-friendly interactive brackets on its website. You can see where and when every game will be and follow them live. Also, ESPN (between ESPN2 and ESPN3.com) does a tremendous job of broadcasting college athletics, the softball tournament included. Use the NCAA’s bracket to see who is playing when and where, and just enjoy the action after that.
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The softball tournament by itself is not enough to compete with college football or March Madness. It certainly is the central focus of Championship May. We can’t forget the rest of the sports around it, though. The lacrosse (men’s and women’s) and tennis (men’s and women’s) tournaments are underway, with lacrosse playing their Elite Eights this weekend while the tennis tournaments are up to the Sweet 16.
Both of these sports have varying degrees of fan followings in different parts of the United States, though neither sport is particularly popular at the college level, which is an absolute shame.
Lacrosse is a sport that is somehow insanely popular in the state of Maryland and a few other places, but not very popular on a broader national level. This sport has long been dominated by the ACC, with Johns Hopkins and a few Ivies appearing on the roster of past champions (and Northwestern on the women’s side). The sport is intense, though, and is a lot of fun to watch. It’s basically a faster-paced game of soccer except people get to whack each other with sticks. There is a reason professional leagues struggle (fan interest is not high), but at the college level the players bring an emotion and intensity you don’t find in the pros.
Just on Sunday, Navy upset Yale in the first round of the men’s tournament. It is hard to describe just how much the win seemed to matter to Navy, but if you watch the end of the ESPN3 replay, you can see just how ecstatic the team is. It’s an excitement that is native to college sports, and the lacrosse tournament brings it to the forefront of lived experience as well as any other team tournament does.
The tennis tournament is interesting in that it has trouble attracting neutral fans. Tennis is inherently an individual (or doubles) sport, so making it into a team sport has always been a challenge. To quickly explain the format, the first team to four points wins each match. The first point is determined by three one-set doubles matches (the first school to win two of those matches gets the point). After that, six best-of-three sets singles matches are played simultaneously, worth one point each. The first school to four points wins.
Because of this, it is a very difficult tournament to watch (you have to keep track of six matches at once), and the quiet nature of tennis usually makes it difficult for the fans to provide a great atmosphere.
Still, fans who attend do a great job of keeping the courts closest to them intense. The players are even more invested in this than in other sports, due to the individual mental nature of tennis. If you are able to follow along and get the right matches, it really can be one of the more fun college sports to watch.
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We’ve mentioned five major tournaments (in three sports) that make this coming weekend the most intense weekend in all of college athletics. If that is not enough for you, the women’s golf championships are next week and the men’s the week after. On top of that, the rowing championship will take place at the end of the month (that might have the fewest fans of any of these sports, but Ohio State has won three national titles in a row, so more than a few Buckeye fans might be interested this year).
What finally makes May better than March or January, though, is what happens next. After the College Football Playoffs, we have to wait eight more months for football season, or at least two months until March Madness. After the basketball tournament is over, it’s another five months until football season or 11 months until next March. If you love college athletics and all the championships, though, there’s no hangover after May. As soon as the softball tournament finishes, we get to follow it up with the baseball tournament (and the track championships) in June.
May doesn’t have the commercial box-office power of January or March. It doesn’t become a part of many water-cooler conversations at the office. It doesn’t receive round-the-clock national coverage from high-end bloggers and websites. Yet, it’s an important and diverse part of the fabric of college sports. If you invest yourself in this underappreciated part of the calendar, your enjoyment of everything that is unique to college sports will exponentially increase.
You don’t have to regret missing out on anything from the past; you can simply be grateful that you’ll have a lot more college sports moments to enjoy in the future… starting this year, and this coming week.
