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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