As the Nebraska softball team prepares for the college softball tournament, it’s important to remember what to expect once they get there. Of course the biggest and first question that anyone getting ready to watch for the first time is, how many teams make the NCAA softball tournament?
The answer to this question gets obscured at times because of the way that college softball deals with the postseason. It does not have a central tournament in the way that NCAA basketball does, though the number of teams is very similar.
How many teams make the NCAA softball tournament?
Because the postseason is divided up into regionals, it can be hard to lose the plot and not know how many teams make the NCAA softball tournament. As it turns out, 16 different regionals are all made up of four teams. Because of this, it can be easy to lose track of the fact that the tournament itself has 64 teams.
This happens to be the same number of teams that in the NCAA baseball tournament and that tournament is run the same way.
Each regional is a kind of double elimination tournament with one team emerging from those regionals. Then two regional winners play each other in a double elimination super regional and then eight teams go to women’s college world series. While basketball has the catchy names like Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, these titles are largely ignoring in college softball mainly because the WCWS also is a double elimination tournament so those final eight teams aren’t knocked off the same way.