OKLAHOMA CITY — After pitching just one inning within the largest recreation in Texas Tech softball historical past, pitcher NiJaree Canady watched the rest of the sport from the dugout. Canady, who began each recreation of the Ladies’s Faculty World Sequence for the Purple Raiders lastly hit her wall.
“I feel the quantity of innings obtained to her,” Texas Tech coach Gerry Glasco informed the media postgame. The previous Louisiana Tech head coach put his ace within the circle for 240 of the Purple Raiders’ 410 innings pitched.
Any why would not he?
Canady accomplished her junior marketing campaign with a 1.11 earned run common and over 300 strikeouts. The Purple Raiders right-hander greater than earned her second $1 million NIL contract earlier than the opening pitch of the winner-take-all Sport 3 at Devon Park right here Friday night time.
Her headline-grabbing NIL offers and dominance on the diamond made her probably the most talked about softball participant in current reminiscence. Sadly for Texas Tech, the highest-paid pitcher in NCAA softball is certainly nonetheless human. After six full video games and 34 innings pitched in 9 days, Canady’s velocity and pitch placement noticeably declined towards Texas.
These are the exhausting details in dissecting the Texas’ 10-4 victory that gave the Longhorns the varsity’s first softball championship. Nevertheless, some see the 2025 Ladies’s Faculty World Sequence battle as providing one thing extra lasting for each packages and the game at massive.
“Actually, it simply will get greater and larger, and I really feel like extra eyes are on the game,” Canady stated Friday night time. “After all, that comes with, like, positives and negatives. There’s all the time, like, unfavorable consideration that comes with it. However I really feel … [we’re] simply rising the game, and simply giving youthful women one thing look as much as, it means lots.”
The primary two video games of the championship sequence every reached a document 2.1 million viewers. The cumulative attendance at Devon Park reached 119,778, a event document. Friday’s recreation noticed a document crowd of 12,269.
File NIL cash. File attendance. File viewership. It may well go away one feeling like Texas Tech’s Canady is on the trail to changing into the Caitlin Clark of NCAA softball.
“If Caitlin Clark would have entered the switch portal after her sophomore yr, the place would the bidding struggle have ended up, figuring out what you understand now?” OpenDorse CEO Blake Lawrence told The Athletic final July. “The guess right here is that the rise of ladies’s sports activities, the rise of softball viewership, and a once-in-a-generation expertise like Caitlin Clark is in the marketplace. The $1 million cost could possibly be justified.”
The quote aged effectively. A yr later and Texas Tech competed of their first NCAA championship sequence. The trophy might have evaded the Purple Raiders of their debut, however Canady and her teammates expressed no regrets.
“Sure, this yr wasn’t how we wished it to go. It isn’t how we wished it to finish,” Canady stated, “however to have the ability to go, to have a staff that did not even make it to a regional the yr earlier than, come to the ultimate, to push a 3rd recreation in a nationwide championship sequence, I really feel like meaning lots.”
Nevertheless, because the junior alluded to, with extra money typically comes extra issues — or, maybe extra consciousness of present issues.
Though Glasco has stated a number of instances Canady’s talent and her impression on this system is value no less than $1 million, he would not shrink back from the exhausting reality about gender inequity in how NIL offers are mentioned.
“I feel it is attention-grabbing. You watch an Ohio State within the males’s soccer recreation, nationwide championship recreation, you do not hear any announcers speaking about NIL,” the coach stated. “I discovered it virtually insulting to her at instances once I hearken to broadcast, how a lot they discuss it, as a result of … I do not hear it once we discuss, once we watch a males’s basketball recreation or a males’s soccer recreation, and, to me, that that is not proper.”
Nevertheless, will these inequities, or the flexibility of a softball program to supply a $1 million greenback NIL deal, quickly be a factor of the previous? As Texas and Texas Tech ready for Sport 3 of the 2025 WCWS, a federal decide made her closing ruling on the House vs. NCAA lawsuit.
House v. NCAA settlement approved: Landmark decision opens door for revenue sharing in college athletics
Brandon Marcello
As a part of the $2.8 billion settlement, starting July 1, colleges can have $20.5 million in funds to divvy out throughout their males’s and girls’s athletic packages.
Ought to the recommended back-payment system be used, 90% of the fund will probably be allotted to soccer and males’s basketball. Ladies’s basketball would obtain 5% of the pool and all different sports activities, together with softball, would spilt the remaining 5%.
Between the Wild West-era of NIL and the growing switch portal visitors, school rosters are continually altering. As extra money comes into sports activities like softball, coaches should strike a stability between cultivating younger athletes and leaders with recruiting superstars who can speed up the championship window.
What’s that stability?
“That is the good unknown proper now,” Texas coach Mike White informed CBS Sports activities Friday night time. “Just like the athletic director [Chris] Del Conte stated, it is, like, arising, crusing out in a flat world and coming off the sting … In some respects, it is nice that these athletes are in a position to form of earn a residing now, or receives a commission for what they do, and that is superior. Nevertheless it’s additionally exhausting to compete.”
Even whereas competing in his eighth WCWS championship, White and his workers had eyes on the switch portal, as a result of that is what is required to compete in 2025. Austin might have the title, however there is no denying that there is additionally a great deal of momentum some 375 miles away in Lubbock.
All indicators level to the rising senior returning to Texas Tech. The query now’s whether or not Canady and Glasco can construct on The NiJa Impact?