The business of covering college sports generally allows for about a six- to eight-week window for vacation this time of year. When the teams practice and play — Texas Tech sponsors 17 teams whose games stretch from August to June — we’re on the go. Locally, when Texas Tech’s spring semester ends, that’s usually a signal that downtime is right around the corner.
Well, the spring semester ended May 12, and some of the most compelling sports of the school year was just cranking into high gear.
Between 2014 and 2019, Tim Tadlock and the Texas Tech baseball program extended the sports school year with four trips to Omaha for the College World Series. And now, just when the baseball program nosedived, Texas Tech softball has given Red Raiders fans another reason to make end-of-year pilgrimages.
The visored-and-ponytailed version of the Red Raiders has served up must-see fare in May and June. They’re winning hearts and new converts. They’re cleaning up in television ratings, playing a fast-moving game while wearing their emotions on their sleeves.
It’s been something to witness. Can’t say I saw this phenomenon coming.
I wouldn’t dare say I’m surprised by the level of support Texas Tech softball has deservedly engendered. People latch on to a winner, and these Red Raiders have microwaved a winner.
Beyond being 54-14 last year and 61-9 this year, though, the Red Raiders roll out so many plotlines, one ought to grab your attention. There’s the refreshing candor of 67-year-old coach Gerry Glasco. The transcendent talent of NiJaree Canady, even if Canady has gone from superhuman to somewhat human at the Women’s College World Series. Such is Tech’s talent pool that people now complain when Glasco lifts his No. 2 pitcher to re-enter one of the most dominant pitchers in NCAA history.
There’s the late-inning theatrics. So many late-inning theatrics that, with Texas Tech three outs away from winning and leading Alabama 4-2 the other night, I might have texted a colleague, “Two-out two-run homer incoming.” Fact check: Mostly accurate. It happened with one out.
There are those dads. You know the ones. And handshake-line drama.
There’s the raiding of other contenders’ rosters for all-Americans. There’s the enduring feud with Texas and the new feuds with Tennessee and Florida.
Who’ll the Red Raiders hack off next?
Oh, yeah, Tech fans are ever on the alert, antennae up, for hints of disapproval from opposing coaches and from folks in my business: about the number of those transfers, about the money spent to obtain them, about the Red Raiders upsetting the softball establishment, about the softball establishment conspiring to freeze out the pillagers and plunderers from the High Plains.
I’m not sure that should be something to get all worked up about.
Being talked about in envious terms (whether that jealousy is real or, in some cases, imagined) beats the heck out of the program’s being talked about not much at all — not much at all in Lubbock, much less across the country. In the 10 seasons before Tech hired Glasco and got its NIL-era house in order, the Red Raiders went through four head coaches. Not a single one of their four tenures ended on pleasant terms — and that’s with three of the four posting winning records, mind you.
If you wanted to hang Kirby Hocutt over something, softball’s inability to get out of its own way again and again and again would’ve been a good place to start, had anyone cared enough about softball to even care.
Oh, they care now.
This stuff today is a million miles from that.
So I sit here at my desk on a pleasant June evening, front door propped open, monitoring Nathan Giese’s non-stop coverage out of Oklahoma City, TV turned to ESPN to hear something that will inevitably get Red Raiders fans all hot and bothered and hostile.
And I just marvel at the spectacle. We could get used to this. And the college softball world needs it.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Tell the truth — you can’t turn away from Texas Tech softball: Opinion
Reporting by Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal | USA TODAY Network
