No WCWS is the `loss of celebration'
ESPN crew feeling incomplete on week of canceled event
Jenny Dalton-Hills at on her porch and needed about 20 seconds to articulate her answer when asked what losing the 2020 Women' s College World Series meant to her.
In a normal year, the ESPN analyst would have already packed her bags for a week in Oklahoma City to cover the WCWS, which was scheduled to begin Thursday. However, the event is just one of many sports to have been canceled in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
When she finally put her emotions about the event into words, Dalton-Hill said the WCWS had become a part of her life every year since her college days, and losing it along with the rest of softball season makes this time of year feel incomplete.
“It means just the loss of celebration. Every single year, you see 297 Division I softball teams training, working, sweating and learning to try to get to Oklahoma City,” Dalton-Hill said. “And so, in a situation like this, it feels incomplete. It feels lost. It feels — there isn't a word for it. I've never had a moment like this where there hasn't been an Oklahoma City moment in my life since 1993.”
In those 27 years of Oklahoma City moments, Dalton-Hill has been on the front lines for the growth of the sport she loves. When she won three WCWS titles in the '90s at Arizona, over 1 million fans didn't watch her games on national television, news outlets didn' t travel from
the country to cover the event and fans outside of softball diehards weren't particularly dialed in.
But all that has changed in recent years. Now, Hall of Fame Stadium regularly sells out its games, local media travel from the coasts to cover their teams and the 2019 WCWS averaged 1 million viewers, which was up 20% year-over-year.
“The thing that's crazy is when you go back and talk to players that played int he' 90s, our postseason was not on TV,” Dalton- Hill said. “We wouldn't make it to Oklahoma City with a ton of pomp and circumstance. There were no interviews There were no newspapers, there were no TV cameras, other than the Oklahoma news.
“And so when we, as we watch the growth of our games, I think there' s moment sofa little bit of jealousy, but at the same time there's so much respect. These younger athletes have to put up with so many different things pulling their attention and their emotions through a very difficult tournament.”
Many people in the softball community have lauded ESPN's coverage of the WCWS. While their softball coverage ramps up in late May for the championship tournament, the sport has grown beyond the WCWS.
The NCAA Super Regional broadcasts last year on ESPN were the most-watched it had been since 2008, and youth baseball and softball participation increased by nearly 3 million between 2013 and 2018, according to a study by the Sports Fitness & Industry Association.
“It' s heart breaking, gut-wrenching ,” said ESPN's Michele Smith, who played at Oklahoma State from 1986-89. “It's sad, not just for the athletes and the fans, but for our ESPN team, there's a lot of us that are really missing the event, our hard work, the companionship together. I think it's been devastating on many levels for many people.”
Those outside of the ESP N circle also see how the sport has grown alongside the network' s increased coverage, including USA Softball National Teams Coordinator Allison Fanning. Years before landing her position with the national team, Fanning was a student manager for OU and watched from the dugout as the Sooners won the WCWS in 2016 and '17.
Perhaps no game better exemplified softball' s growth on the national stage than Oklahoma' s 17- inning win over Florida in the 2017 WCWS finals. The game averaged 1.5 million viewers, which was a WCWS record at the time, and the stadium housed 8,337.
“The amount of people you could see in the stands was crazy,” Fanning said .“I think the standing room would sometimes be 10 people deep and I don't even know how they were seeing the field. But it's pretty awesome that so many people were trying toge tin there. We could all just hear the entire stadium screaming `Boomer Sooner' and it was just like a football game at Owen Field.”
Fanning worked for Duke's softball team in 2019 and didn't make it to Oklahoma City for the tournament, but she saw the benefits of how ESPN made it easy and accessible to watch softball from anywhere in the country.
“I think what ESPN has done is great. The fact that every game is on and then the fact that the championship series is on primetime ESPN is awesome,” Fanning said. “I mean, that 17-inning game, we were on ESPN and we actually bumped the (Los Angeles) Dodgers off of ESPN to something else because our game was still going.”
In the absence of live softball, the ESPN crew has had more time to focus on the 7 Innings Podcast, a weekly softball show hosted by Smith, Jessica Mendoza, Beth Mowins and Holly Rowe. Since NCAA sports were shut down in March, the trio has interviewed prominent players and coaches, including OU coach Patty Gas so, Alabama coach Patrick Murphy and UCLA star Rachel Garcia.
“We record on a Zoom video call, so we get to see each other's expressions and laugh,” Smith said. “That camaraderie that you see on the field, we actually have it as well, with our ESPN team. It's been ni ce, and al most healing in a way, for us to continue to talk about the sport and share the things we love about it, and hopefully giving the fans of the sport enough of a taste and continuation of the sport that it helps get them through.”