The top eight teams in college softball are heading to Oklahoma City this week to compete for a national championship in the Women’s College World Series (WCWS). There are multiple storylines to follow, from Oklahoma seeking its fifth consecutive national championship to Texas Tech playing in the WCWS for the first time.

Here are several Black softball standouts to follow during the Women’s College World Series, which begins Thursday. All game times are in Eastern (ET).

Texas Tech: NiJaree Canady, pitcher 

Junior NiJaree Canady has led Texas Tech to its first Women’s College World Series appearance in program history. 

Canady, who helped her former school, Stanford, advance to the WCWS twice (2023 and 2024), made history last summer after accepting a $1 million offer to play for Texas Tech, the highest-paid NIL deal in college softball. She currently ranks first in the country with a 0.89 ERA and sixth in strikeouts (279). 

Though Canady, a finalist for USA Softball’s Collegiate Player of the Year award, is known for her pitching, she also has embraced a hitting role for Texas Tech. She has a .312 batting average, 34 RBIs and a team-high 11 home runs. Texas Tech defeated Florida State in two games at the Tallahassee Super Regional last week to advance to the WCWS, and in Game 1, Canady threw a two-hit shutout and had a home run in Texas Tech’s first ever Super Regional win.

Texas Tech will face Mississippi at 7 p.m. Thursday on ESPN2.

Oklahoma: Ella Parker, designated hitter, and Cydney Sanders, first base 

Sophomore Ella Parker, who was named to the 2025 All-SEC tournament team, is hitting .416 with a team-high 19 doubles this season.

After defeating Alabama 3-0 in Game 1 of the Tuscaloosa Super Regional last weekend, the Sooners recorded a run-rule win against the Crimson Tide in five innings (13-2) in Game 2, earning Oklahoma’s ninth consecutive WCWS appearance. Parker went 3-for-4 in the game with a home run, two doubles and three RBIs.

Oklahoma has won four consecutive national championships, and senior Cydney Sanders was a part of the last two. The first baseman also was selected for the 2025 All-SEC tournament team, tallying three RBIs in the tournament before Oklahoma and Texas A&M were named co-champions after the championship game was canceled because of rain.

Oklahoma will play Tennessee at 2:30 p.m. Thursday on ESPN. 

UCLA: Jordan Woolery, third base

Jordan Woolery, the 2023 PAC-12 Freshman of the Year, has continued to excel throughout her career as a Bruin. The junior ranks second on the team this season in batting average (.415) and home runs (23), and she leads the Bruins in RBIs (86) and total bases (173). Woolery, who was named to this year’s All-Big Ten first team, was a top 10 finalist for USA Softball’s Collegiate Player of the Year award this season.

Woolery produced four RBIs over the weekend during UCLA’s three-game series against South Carolina in the Columbia Super Regional. In Game 2, she hit a walk-off, two-run home run with two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning to secure UCLA’s 5-4 comeback victory and force a Game 3, which the Bruins won 5-0.

UCLA will play Oregon at 9:30 p.m. Thursday on ESPN2. 

Texas: Mia Scott, third base

Mia Scott continues to propel the Longhorns’ offense. The senior leads her team in batting average, hitting .438. She has a team-high 18 doubles this season and plays strong defense to match. Scott, who has a .960 fielding percentage, has made only five errors this season.

The All-SEC first-team selection was a member of the Texas team that lost to Oklahoma in last year’s WCWS championship. Scott, who was named to the 2024 WCWS All-Tournament Team, is looking to win a national championship in her final season.

Texas defeated Clemson in a three-game series during last weekend’s Austin Super Regional to advance to the WCWS, with Scott going 5-for-13 at the plate. 

Texas will face Florida at noon Thursday on ESPN.

Ole Miss: Aliyah Binford, pitcher, and Jaden Pone, outfield

Seniors Aliyah Binford and Jaden Pone played key roles in helping Ole Miss clinch its first WCWS appearance.

Binford is hitting .328 with a team-leading 55 RBIs. With 80 strikeouts this season, she also has been important in the relief role; last weekend, Binford pitched during the second inning of Game 3 of the Arkansas Super Regional, allowing two hits and one earned run while striking out four to secure Ole Miss’ spot in the WCWS with a 7-4 win over Arkansas.

Pone leads the team in hitting with a .363 batting average, and she has a team-high 17 stolen bases, making her extremely effective in the leadoff spot in Ole Miss’ lineup. She earned All-SEC first-team honors, becoming only the second player in program history to do so.

Ole Miss will face Texas Tech at 7 p.m. Thursday on ESPN2.

Oregon: Dezianna Patmon, outfield

Senior Dezianna Patmon, who started her career in 2022 at North Carolina A&T and later transferred to New Mexico State for the 2024 season, will finish her career with Oregon in Oklahoma City. 

Five days after Patmon hit a walk-off home run against Stanford to advance Oregon to the Eugene Super Regional, she was clutch again. Oregon opened the Super Regional series against Liberty last week with another walk-off win off Patmon’s bat, and Oregon’s 13-1 victory in Game 2 sent the Ducks to the WCWS for the first time since 2018.

Oregon will face UCLA at 9:30 p.m. Thursday on ESPN2.

Cayla Sweazie is a women’s and college sports reporter. She is a former HBCU athlete (Go Bears) with a passion for giving student-athletes a platform to share their stories.

The North Carolina Tar Heels know there are high expectations for them in the Chapel Hill Regional. There, head coach Scott Forbes is going to lean on one of the best rotations in all of college baseball to get UNC to the Super Regional round of the NCAA Tournament.

Shortly following the Field of 64 being set, Forbes shared that he plans on turning the ball over to Jake Knapp on Friday. At the same time, he emphasized that he has faith in all of his weekend starters to get the job done when given the ball.

“Yeah, that’s my initial gut,” Scott Forbes said. “I feel like we have three Friday night guys. We want the option now.”

In the final weekend series this year, Forbes handed the ball to Jake Knapp, Jason DeCaro, and Aidan Haugh. Later, in the ACC Tournament, Ryan Lynch would get a start as Forbes looked to get his rotation work ahead of the NCAA Tournament.

“I thought the [ACC] tournament really helped us. We wanted to win the tournament, but what we wanted to do was get Aiden some experience out of the bullpen in case we face somebody that’s got a lot of lefties because he’s got that good changeup,” Forbes said. “And we wanted to get Lynch a potential start in case he has to make a start because he would be that guy.”

Haugh, who is now a senior, has pitched in 36 games this season. That includes 21 starts. In that time, he pitched 67.1 innings and has an ERA of 3.74 with 73 strikeouts. Lynch, meanwhile, is a freshman who appeared in 24 games while making one start. That start came in the ACC Tournament Championship Game, and he pitched four innings in it. For the season as a whole, he’s thrown 48.1 innings and has an ERA of 2.98 with 60 strikeouts.

Scott Forbes has plenty of faith in both Haugh and Lynch. However, his top two pitchers Knapp and DeCaro are ones who he’s expected to lean on for the entirety of UNC’s postseason run.

“But right now, the way Knapp and DeCaro — they’re both two of the best pitchers in the country,” Forbes said. “I’m confident with them pitching against anybody. So, we will probably keep them on that rest that they just had.”

Knapp has appeared in 14 games, making 13 starts this season after missing 2024 with an injury. In 87 innings pitched he has an ERA of 2.17 with 78 strikeouts. DeCaro, for his part, has appeared in 14 games, all of which were starts. In 73.2 innings pitched, he has an ERA of 3.42 with 62 strikeouts.

North Carolina opens the NCAA Tournament with Holy Cross on Friday. Depending on the results, they’ll then play either Nebraska or Oklahoma. After that, it’s on to the Super Regional.

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​​EUGENE, Ore. — Mason Neville wasn’t sure what to expect when he entered the transfer portal in the summer of 2023.

Thousands of athletes have gone to the portal after stellar individual seasons in search of more NIL money, higher-profile programs and the chance to chase trophies.

Neville wasn’t in that group, and he knew it. As a freshman outfielder at Arkansas in 2023, the Las Vegas native struck out 20 times in 33 plate appearances. Never mind that he was a top-100 national prospect coming out of high school and was selected by the Cincinnati Reds in the 18th round of the 2022 MLB Draft.

One year of college baseball and Neville had, in his own words, no leverage.

“There were jumps I needed to make as a baseball player, and I knew that,” he said. “But when you’re not getting playing time, it makes you second-guess what you’ve done previously. I was asking myself, ‘Am I not good?’”

Two years and 2,000 miles later, the answer to that question has become clear.

Neville is thriving in his second season at Oregon, hitting .293 with a 1.179 OPS and leading the country in home runs with 26. He’s the centerpiece of an Oregon offense that has the Ducks positioned to make a run at their first College World Series appearance in school history. Oregon, the No. 12 seed in the NCAA Tournament, plays Utah Valley on Friday at 6 p.m. (PT) in the first game of the Eugene Regional.

Neville is No. 26 in MLB.com’s latest mock draft and No. 38 at Baseball America.

There’s a new single-season HR leader in @OregonBaseball history.

He’s Mason Neville, and here’s his record-setting th blast #B1GBaseball pic.twitter.com/0ET08mqL9W

— Big Ten Baseball (@B1Gbaseball) April 21, 2025

But more than confidence and an impressive stat line, Neville has something else that had gone missing in Fayetteville: Joy.

That much is evident in the fun he has when little kids from the community crowd around him after games, begging for autographs and selfies. It’s clear from the smile that creeps up whenever he blasts a shot over the fence and trots around the bases, a joy he can’t fully describe because, “I kinda blackout after home runs,” he said.

Neville can barely talk about success — his and his team’s — without breaking into a grin and marveling at how much better things are not just for him, but for them. Joy has become the foundation of this season, allowing him to take constructive criticism from his dad, a former college player, and his coaches, without it shaking his confidence. He’s remembered not only that he’s good at this game, but he loves it, too.

And those things are true even when he’s not playing it perfectly.

When he watches film of his freshman year, Neville sees a kid desperate to prove himself, who thought the only way to do that was to bomb baseballs over the fence. He was in his own head too much.

That was obvious to Mason’s dad, Trevor, a former junior college player who first put a bat in Mason’s hands, helped him become one of the best players in the country and then watched his confidence crumble at Arkansas.

“If his confidence wasn’t completely broken, it was cracking,” Trevor said. “For athletes, that fear of failure is always there. It was tough. He was saying, ‘Does anyone even want me?’ I tried to remind him, ‘You’re a great ball player, and people recruited you for a reason. You are going to have options.’”

Dad was right. Numerous schools reached out to Mason once they knew he wanted to transfer, with Oregon coach Mark Wasikowski one of the first to call. Trevor said the day after Wasikowski talked to Mason on the phone, the sixth-year coach was in the Nevilles’ Las Vegas living room, telling Mason, “We lost you once, we’re not gonna lose you again.”

Mason, a desert kid who loves sunshine and being outdoors, had concerns about playing in a cold, rainy climate where early-season games are often rescheduled because of downpours. But he also figured if he was successful in Eugene, he could be successful anywhere.

“I’ve grown to appreciate it a little bit. Those four-hour practices in the rain, it builds character,” he joked.

He’s excelled at Oregon partially because he’s taken pressure off himself. Ducks hitting coach Jack Marder has stressed that hitting home runs is not the goal — getting on base is. He’s harped to the entire team to cut down on strikeouts. In 2024, the Ducks totaled 531 strikeouts in 60 games; through 56 games this season, they’ve struck out just 407 times. He’s told players that being good offensively is not only about how you’re hitting the ball but “how you’re setting the table to create runs for other players.”

Neville, Marder said, didn’t necessarily need major mechanical changes. He just needed a different approach.

“He was a completely out-of-sync mover at Arkansas,” Marder said. “His lower half and upper half didn’t work together, which meant he had to be perfectly on time (to get a hit). That can really put negative thoughts in a player’s head if they have to be perfect to be successful.”

More reps have helped, too. After battling an injury at the beginning of 2024, Neville settled into the Ducks’ lineup late last season, starting Oregon’s final 23 games and batting .318 (28-for-88) with 10 home runs in that stretch. He credits his success to the simplicity of routine.

Neville’s also come around to understanding the value of getting on base no matter how it happens. He set the single-season program record for walks in the finale of the Washington series and has walked 52 times in 53 games, tied for the 14th most in Division I.

“Being more disciplined at the plate is a big part of my success this season, and knowing when I get my pitch, I’m not missing it,” Neville said.

Nothing beats the feeling he gets in the split second just before his bat connects with the ball.

“When you’re on time and you get a pitch you can handle — you can usually tell based on how it comes out of a pitcher’s hand, it looks a little different — when you know it’s in your zone because you’ve done it over 1,000 times in BP, you know you’re about to smash it.”

Mason’s season has been especially gratifying for Trevor to watch, even if he still occasionally gives feedback to his kid.

When he strikes out, Mason might try to justify it to Trevor, telling Dad that in the big leagues, an ump would have never called that particular pitch a strike. Trevor won’t have it. “If the ump calls it a strike, it’s a strike! You gotta swing at it!”

It reminds them both of shouting matches they’d get into when Mason was younger and Trevor would throw batting practice. If a pitch sailed by and Mason didn’t swing, Trevor would call it a strike, igniting an argument. Mason would claim the pitch was way out of the zone, while Trevor, incredulous, would tell his oldest, “You do not argue with the person throwing BP!”

They laugh about it now. Mason described Trevor as “my best friend,” the person who instilled confidence in him even as he struggled early in his college career. Trevor and his wife, Jessica, have made it to almost every single Oregon weekend series this season. Mason grudgingly admits that his dad has “been right about pretty much everything.” When he’s home in Vegas, he asks daily if they can go hit. When they’re not in the cages, they’re usually on the pickleball court or maybe the golf course. Mason and his younger sister Emma, a freshman beach volleyball player at Cal State Bakersfield, will team up against their mom and dad to play anything for hours.

“We lose every time,” Mason groaned. “They smash us no matter what we’re playing. They always find a way to beat us. It kills me.”

Some parents see value in letting their kids win to boost their confidence. Trevor doesn’t believe in that. Asked who the best pure athlete in the family is, he initially said if the Nevilles held some sort of sports decathlon, where they had to demonstrate skill from each of the major sports, “I’d smoke ’em.”

Later, he recalibrated. His kids are Division I athletes, a level he never reached. He should probably be realistic.

But Mason loves the trash talk. Over the last few years, he has had three major goals:

1) Find joy in baseball again, 2) Help his team to Omaha, 3) Beat his dad in pickleball.

He’s one-for-three. He knows that in baseball, batting .333 is pretty good. But he’s not satisfied yet.

(Photo courtesy of Oregon Athletics)