INDIANAPOLIS--The Westminster College softball program will travel to Angola, Ind. to open its run at the NCAA Division III Championship Thursday in regional round action against No. 5 Trine University.
The Division III Softball Committee announced the 62 teams competing in the Division III Softball Championship Monday morning.
Trine (39-3), last year's Division III champion, captured its third-straight Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) Championship Tournament title last past weekend. The additional two teams, both at-large selections, traveling to Angola this weekend are the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (32-7) out of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC) and the University of Mount Union (32-8), members of the Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC).
Westminster and Trine will get things going Thursday at noon from SportONE/Parkview Softball Field. UWSP and Mount Union will follow at 2:30 p.m.
Westminster (25-11) won its first Presidents' Athletic Conference (PAC) title in 19 years after knocking off No. 6 Waynesburg University 1-0 in the championship tournament's title game on May 4. Freshman shortstop Ava Karpa (Coraopolis, Pa., Moon) delivered the game-winning base hit in the bottom of the seventh inning. As the winner of this year's PAC tournament title, Westminster secured the league's automatic qualifying bid to the Division III Championship (Pool A).
Trine won this year's MIAA title with a 4-3 victory over Calvin University Saturday. The Thunder have appeared in the Division III Championship 14 times. This will be Westminster's first-ever trip the Division III Championship.
The regional round is scheduled for May 16-18. Four teams will compete at 15 regional sites and two teams will compete at one regional site. The team advancing from each regional will compete in the super regional round May 23-24. The finals, hosted by East Texas Baptist University, will be held May 30 -June 5 at Bell Park at Taylor Field in Marshall, Texas. All rounds will use a double-elimination format, and the two-team regional will play a best-of-five series.
Forty-one conferences received an automatic qualification (Pool A). One institution was selected from Pool B, which includes independent institutions and schools from conferences that do not meet the automatic qualification criteria. The 20 remaining teams were selected on an at-large basis from automatic qualifying conferences and institutions included in Pool B.
