Mike_Louko

I think the AUSL can be an enduring pro league. I am happy to see the PSL taking their shot too, but ultimately I hope to see their teams picked up by Athletes Unlimited. The sport needs all of their best in one league if it is going to survive. There are some great players in both leagues. The AUSL is better marketed, better managed, and has stronger corporate ties. ** Edited by Mike_Louko at 6/17/2026, 8:01:48 AM

It would take something horrendous, not a grumpy pouty face, to see an umpire insert themselves like that on this stage. Takes a lot to ignore those reactions, but the ump simply has to ignore it.

If you aren’t looking here… https://stats.ncaa.org/selection_rankings/nitty_gritties/ then you aren’t looking at “THE” RPI. There are others who have pretty accurately reverse-engineered the algorithm, including d1softball.com, but I have seen close miscalculations at most of them. The benefit to using non-authoritative sites is that you get real time predictions. The downside is that you might be looking at a false report. The NCAA typically only updates once per day, usually by 9 or 10 in the morning. Just make sure you include games through yesterday’s date. If you don’t see yesterday’s date, refresh the page. If you still don’t see yesterday’s date, they haven’t published the updated calculation yet ** Edited by Mike_Louko at 5/9/2026, 8:47:37 PM

As far as college athletics goes, Title IX applies to the proportional number of male/female athletes IN THE AGGREGATE with no regard to individual teams or their likenesses to each other. As such, hypothetically if the math worked out correctly, you could eliminate men’s basketball and men’s soccer with the women’s offset being lacrosse if the two men’s teams combined to be just about (or slightly greater than) the same number of athletes as women’s lacrosse. As a university with slightly more men than women, I believe that the proportion of target athletes is to match that m/f ratio rather than being held to a 50/50 standard. Basketball for basketball, soccer for soccer, and even baseball for softball are common add (or drop) pairings, but there is no requirement to match with “like” sports. I sincerely hope that it never comes down to dropping any sport programs, as they all add to the overall student experience. I would love to see more students in the softball stands. In this era of big money sports paying out a growing percentage of total athletic dollars, non-revenue sports that don’t touch the student body in meaningful ways become ripe for any reduction discussions regardless of the program success or community support.

I will gladly root for Kansas over Arizona State and Houston over Baylor so that UVA can lose and cling onto that top 25 spot by a thread. Not that I have any love loss for Duke, but rule #1 is to always root for Tech and rule #2 is to never root for UVA! That said, if Duke wins the series 2-1, that would probably be fine with me too.

For this year’s player stats, it is the best. Accurate. Sortable. Not sure why softball insists on linking to the separate stats site when the standard built-in functionality that pretty much every other team uses is better. Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

I couldn’t make it to Athens, but there are a good number of very enthusiastic regulars who were there.

If several people split their total donation amount in halves, thirds, quarters, etc., giving small amounts separately each time, does Chip's ambassador donation count include the additional donations and effectively multiply his count? If so, that would be a great way to try to win something extra in the ambassador challenge!