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2019 Season Opens This Weekend

The 2019 college softball season is now underway, with the usual myriad of tournaments. Two of the three preseason polls place defending national champion Florida State in the top spot, as shown in the following table.

Rank USA Softball/ESPN NFCA/USA Today Flo Softball
1 UCLA Florida State Florida State
2 Washington UCLA Oklahoma
3 Florida State Washington Washington
4 Oklahoma Oklahoma UCLA
5 Florida Florida Florida
6 Arizona Georgia Arizona
7 Georgia Arizona South Carolina
8 Tennessee Tennessee Georgia
9 South Carolina Alabama (Tie-9) Tennessee
10 LSU S. Carolina (Tie-9) Michigan

One of the opening-weekend majors, the Kajikawa Classic at Arizona State, is diminished in both quantity and quality. Whereas this tournament featured between 22-32 teams in previous years, this year there are only 12. And none of the participating schools is in the Top 10.

The University of South Florida tourney, which has long featured Florida and Michigan, brings in Arizona for the first time in a decade.

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