Erika Barnes still gets nervous on NCAA Softball Selection Sunday.
Barnes knows what it’s like to be a softball player waiting to find out if you are playing in the postseason, where you are playing and if you are hosting.
When she played first base for Arizona from 1998-2001 her name was Erika Hanson. The UA made the Women’s College World Series each of her four years and won a championship in her senior season.
Barnes also knows what it’s like to be an administrator at your alma mater — pulling for your school to make it and waiting to find out if they have to start preparing the stadium for a weekend of home games or make travel plans.
She’s worked at Arizona for 14 years and been a senior associate athletic director and senior woman administrator at Arizona since 2013.
However, on May 12, Barnes found out what it’s like to be on another side of the equation — as a member of the D-I Women’s Softball Committee, the group that selects who’s in and where they play. During the selection show she was sitting in the Denver Airport on a layover, waiting to fly back to Tucson — and she was experiencing that same feeling she gets every year.
“I was super anxious watching the show — for Arizona and wanting to see the (other) team’s reactions,” said Barnes, whose term on the committee ends in August 2022.
Barnes’ freshman year on the committee couldn’t have happened at a better time. Coach Mike Candrea and the Wildcats put together a memorable season, making it back to the WCWS for the first time since 2010. Not that Barnes had anything to do with UA’s top seed in the postseason. To the contrary, for the first time in many years, Barnes had to take off her UA hat and wasn’t part of any discussion around her beloved Wildcats.
“I did have to recuse myself when we talked about Arizona,” Barnes said. “I was happy that UA positioned itself in the top eight for all criteria. As coach Candrea always says ‘stats don’t lie and you gotta win.’
“When you love a sport and you see it develop and evolve — credit ESPN — you do have to remove your institutional hat and think what will be a competitive and fun postseason, what’s best for the student-athletes’ experience and for the sport.”
The committee consists of 10 members, and is made up of a few coaches, athletic directors and softball women administrators from across the country.
Barnes led the Pacific Region and held weekly conference calls with coaches to talk about rankings, the region, and then what was happening nationally. And the committee would have calls to share their regional knowledge. It all started heating up in March.
And Barnes watched a lot of softball. In addition to her typical game days at Hillenbrand Stadium, the NCAA provided each committee member the TV and live-stream times so they could watch specific teams.
The Wildcats’ strength of schedule, ranked No. 2 in the nation, helped Barnes as she saw many teams in person, including Alabama, Florida State, Minnesota and Cal State Fullerton . That’s in addition to UA’s Pac-12 rivals UCLA and Washington.
UA also played neutral-site games against Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Michigan and Florida in the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic and the USF Opening Weekend Invitational.
Strength of schedule is one of the factors that the committee uses to determine who’s in and who hosts for regionals. And, as any coach knows, it’s a tricky thing.
“You want to be able to challenge your team early on to see how you are developing. Scheduling is interesting,” Barnes said. “For (UA soccer) coach Tony Amato and (baseball) coach Jay Johnson, it’s always about scheduling. You wonder what was the strategy — to challenge the team or if you want to win to be over .500? There are a lot of factors that go into this and at the very end you have to win.”
Besides scheduling and RPI, the committee focuses on the games themselves. TCU, for instance, beat Florida State and then Washington came into Tucson and swept UA.
“I watched us versus Washington at home — every pitch at Hillenbrand when Reyna (Carranco) broke her hand. You have to watch the nuances,” Barnes said. “The competition is so good. It’s really a game of inches, as coach Candrea always says. What has been neat is how there is so much parity. When sitting in the room from Friday through Sunday it comes down to splitting hairs.”
And yes, Barnes really spent the better part of three days in one room and she couldn’t have predicted the pairings going into the weekend.
“What our chair (Brandi Stuart, UCF’s senior associate athletic director) said is true ‘until you are in the room drilling down on every game, it’s tough to know how it end up.’ By the time I was flying in (to Indianapolis) one of the biggest series of the year — UCLA versus UA — was going on, as well as the SEC Tournament. They were happening when we were there. So we were watching them, but we still have to look at the full body of work of each team.”
While Barnes couldn’t share specifics about how they came to a consensus, she did share what it was like to be in the room.
“Yes, you are holed up in a room with computers in front of us — the technology was impressive,” she said. “We had team sheets with all the information you would want — a lot of windows open (on the computer) and going back and forth — and white-boarding. At breakfast, lunch, and breaks we were still talking, living and breathing it. And then we went to bed on Saturday night, at the point that we felt good about everything. You sleep on it and come in Sunday with a fresh mindset. And things change a couple of hours up to the selection show.
“You go in knowing that you can’t make 100% of the teams happy, but as a whole this is the best position possible.”
The hardest thing for Barnes? Picking the rest of the field. “There are so many great and deserving teams and you feel like you are splitting hairs,” she said.
With Arizona in the WCWS, Barnes was excused from her remaining duties — including hosting a team and helping with logistics. Instead, Barnes sat in the stands with former UA teammates Leah O’Brien Amico and Toni Mascarenas.
“In this role — my position at UA — I do so many things I never thought I’d be doing,” she said. “When I was in the dugout there (at the WCWS) I probably had no idea what those opportunities would be. It’s so nice to get back to my roots — the game I love and why I went to the UA.”
