Year in Preview: 2025

The year 2025 is officially upon us; gone and officially in the history books and memories is the year 2024. What lies ahead for softball in ’25? A look at what’s in store in the new year:

College Softball

• Oklahoma will aim for its 5th consecutive National Championship in June, but they’ll do so with a very different-looking roster than the group that won the last four titles. A large group of transfers and freshmen replace a 10-member graduating class, but even with such talent turnover, the Sooners will still be one of the early favorites to take home the WCWS trophy.
  
• Members of the old PAC-12 are now scattered across four other conferences, officially splitting the sport’s most history-filled league. Three PAC-12 softball teams are now in the Big Ten, three have moved to the Big 12, a pair now call the ACC home, and one has journeyed to the West Coast Conference for the next two years.
  
• Speaking of realignment, 2025 will be the first softball season for Oklahoma and Texas as members of the SEC. The archrivals, who also went head-to-head for two of the last three national championships, add nearly-impenetrable strength to the nation’s deepest league.
  
• NiJaree Canady was the biggest softball star to enter the transfer portal since the portal’s creation. She got a history-making NIL deal at Texas Tech, which made plenty of headlines at the time, but now she’s also the figurehead and will be relied upon to build the Texas Tech program up quickly.
  
• The return of Jordy Bahl to the circle may come with less fanfare than her Nebraska debut did a year ago, but it’s no less anticipated. The former national champion and All-American barely got to make that debut before suffering an injury that derailed her new team’s plans to build with her as their new cornerstone. Bahl is back and healthy in 2025.

Pro Softball

All three professional softball organizations that played in 2024 are returning in similar fashion in 2025.

• Athletes Unlimited will officially debut its AUSL traditional-style pro league this summer, a 4-team, traveling entity that plans to play in multiple cities around the country. After five years of solely playing under their unique leaderboard format, AU has announced their team names, head coaches, and general managers, and will begin play in the traditional-format league in early summer.
  
• The WPF remains somewhat in disarray with questions surrounding multiple teams that took part in the league last summer, but the Texas Smoke are stable if no other team is. What the league, and even the team, will look like in 2025 remains to be seen, but they’ll be on the field in some respect.
  
• Other pro teams, like the Florida Vibe, New York Rise, and OKC Spark, are also returning to the field in 2025. All three teams played in the Association of Fastpitch Professionals last summer and have already announced some plans for their own returns to the field this year. Exhibition games against opponents outside the AFP have also been announced.

Conference Realignment

In addition to the disbursal of the former PAC-12 members and Texas and Oklahoma’s formal move to the SEC, six other schools will play the 2025 season in new conference homes of their own.

Kennesaw State, Merrimack, Sacred Heart, and Stephen F. Austin changed conferences this summer, while Mercyhurst and West Georgia moved up to D1 from the Division 2 ranks. There are now 309 D1 softball programs.

July 1, 2025 will also see the execution of some additional realignment, with Delaware and Missouri State moving to Conference USA, UMass joining the MAC, and Seattle joining the West Coast Conference.

After some mid-fall transition, reversal, and a different direction, Grand Canyon is in an interesting spot. Previously announcing their intentions to join the WCC this summer, the Lopes then reversed course and announced plans to join the Mountain West, effective in 2026. There’s a year of potential limbo in there, but don’t be surprised if the Lopes wind up playing a Mountain West schedule a year earlier than planned. They’ll play *somewhere*, that’s what’s known for certain.

A Changing Landscape

The ongoing attempts to settle the House court case continue to have a cascading effect on college athletics as a whole. Many pieces of the NCAA’s long-standing precedents have been and are being challenged legally, and many of them aren’t holding up under scrutiny.

You’ll hear a lot about revenue sharing and scholarship limits in 2025; if the House settlement is enacted, the scholarship limits could be put in place in a matter of just a few months. NIL and collectives have taken a back seat for the time being, with revenue-sharing dominating the landscape, but aren’t disappearing from the eye.

The latest development is the NCAA’s waiver in light of the Diego Pavia court case. After a judge allowed the Vanderbilt quarterback to return for the 2025 season, accepting his argument that junior college years of eligibility should not count toward his D1 eligibility, the NCAA appealed that decision, but also released a blanket waiver for athletes in similar positions.

That appeal is still pending, but notably, the waiver applies to any athlete who previously “competed at a non-NCAA school for one or more years” and whose NCAA eligibility would otherwise be exhausted after the 2024-25 athletic year.

Names to Know

• Returning from injury, still positioned to lead her home state school back to national prominence… Jordy Bahl has a lot on her shoulders, but she’s also embraced that pressure and her almost-ambassadorial role for Husker softball. Following her injury, if she’s back to being ‘old Jordy’, she’s in a position to take the softball world by storm yet again.

• Jocelyn Erickson was one of last season’s true breakout stars and she has a chance to be the sport’s next true superstar on the offensive side of the ball. The reigning SEC Player of the Year helped lead Florida to last year’s WCWS semifinals and is quickly becoming a household name in the sport.

• Two young, budding stars could be household names by the time June rolls around. Florida State sophomore Jaysoni Beachum – the reigning National Freshman of the Year – and Arkansas freshman Ella McDowell are two of the most exciting players in recent memory. Beachum’s cool calmness at the hot corner and McDowell’s never-ending energy set them each apart.

• A sport in need of superstars could find one that’s easy to root for in now-Omaha pitcher Maddia Groff. She was an All-American as a freshman at Southern Illinois last season, winning 30 games, then transferred back to her hometown school this summer. Groff is young, already tremendously successful, and has received the national acclaim that some players wait their entire careers for. A hometown kid who also plays with her sister Rylinn, Groff is in position to see her star rise even more.

• UCLA freshman pitcher Addisen Fisher was a consensus top prospect in the Class of 2024 and she’ll step into a Bruins staff that showed strength without numbers last season, but now has that depth and is even stronger. A heralded prospect, Fisher’s debut will be much anticipated by the Bruin faithful – and it won’t take the rest of the country very long to catch up.

• On the professional front, Amanda Lorenz won last year’s Athletes Unlimited title and got plenty of acclaim and attention even from outside the softball ranks, including participating in Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby X events. She’s maintained her star status since her All-American days at Florida and can take credit for some added anticipation ahead of the 2025 professional season.