Happy Monday, everyone. It was a banner weekend on the diamonds for Alabama. The top ranked softball team will face Texas Tech tonight at 6pm CT, needing only one win in two tries to reach the national finals, thanks to a dominant win over Nebraska on Saturday. Nick Kelly notes that only one minor flaw showed up.
“One of the things we practice at our field at practices is if it’s a large crowd, which we usually have, you use your arm as well to say I got it, I got it, I got it,” Murphy said. “They were all encouraged to do that ‘cause, I mean, it’s a tough error. They should have been caught, both of them.”
The gaffes didn’t ultimately cost the Crimson Tide on Saturday. But it’s important those remain outliers, not the start of a trend in OKC, starting at 6 p.m. CT on Monday with the WCWS semifinal game on Monday against Texas Tech. Alabama is a win away from the finals.
Kelly also has a cool story about how Patrick Murphy’s math teacher from 40 years ago played a role in his getting into coaching, and still follows him today.
Her investment goes past supporting a former student. That really was just the introduction. When Gade took the teaching job in Murphy’s school district in the early 1980s, she was about 22 in the town of 1,515 people at the time. Murphy’s family was one that invited the new teacher over for dinner.
They ate lasagna, and from there, a friendship grew with the entire family. Gade could talk sports with them, which piqued Murphy’s interest. She went on to coach everything from basketball and softball to swimming.
Gade also ran the parks and rec department during the summers. One year, she needed someone to coach a little league softball program.
So, she hired this 18-year-old young man she knew named Pat Murphy.
“I just knew that he was good and he was interested and he would care about it,” Gade said. “And he was very invested.”
And there began Murphy’s career coaching softball. He did it for two summers and “had a great time.”
Meanwhile, the baseball team took care of business in regional play and will host a Super Regional against either FSU or St. John’s next weekend. Chase Goodbread notes that Greg Byrne chose wisely with Coach Rob Vaughn.
Byrne found Vaughn at Maryland, where in six seasons at a historically struggling program he reached NCAA regionals three times and earned Big Ten coach-of-the-year honors twice. He’ll now enter his first NCAA super regional, and beyond 2026 there’s a broader sense that even better baseball is ahead for the Crimson Tide.
Alabama hasn’t reached the CWS in 28 years, and Vaughn is its best coach since Jim Wells, who took that Crimson Tide team to Omaha and finished fourth nationally.
Byrne’s got a good one.
Trent Seaborn looked like the better of Alabama’s two QB commits at the Elite 11.
One of the main draws of the event is that it places every competitor on an even playing field. They are all completing the same drills, making the same throws, and competing under the same pressure. This certainly appears to have benefited Seaborn, who looked like one of the more composed quarterbacks at the event, which makes sense given his four years of experience with AHSAA 7A (now 6A) powerhouse Thompson.
On the flip side, Haven looked inconsistent. He overthrew a number of receivers, appeared uncertain at times in the five-step drop and lacked the polish some of the standouts from the weekend displayed. He still showed the arm strength and physical gifts that had made him the No. 1 QB in the class, at one point making an outraegous throw on the run in his Pro Day, but may be due for a slight dip in the rankings.
Last, while this high school recruiting class is expected to be smaller for Alabama, Kalen DeBoer and company are hot in pursuit of LB Isaac McNeil.
“The versatility in his game is attractive to Alabama, and a lot of colleges that are recruiting him,” Jackson said. “He is very, very athletic for his size. He has the ability to turn speed to power. He’s one of those prospects where he can very well come to your campus and put on, you know, 20 pounds and become an All-SEC edge rusher. He could stay at Mike linebacker and become a day-one draft pick there.”
Vigor recruiting coordinator Curtis Maye predicted this path for McNeil well before the statistics showed up.
“I was just telling him the other day I knew that he was going to be a big-time prospect,” Maye said, thinking about McNeil, the sophomore who had 12 tackles-for-loss and four sacks with 16 total tackles in 2024.
That’s about it for today. Have a great week.
Roll Tide.
