Forget football, this weekend Gainesville is a softball town.
To say that the Gators, the No.1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, were flying under the radar at the beginning of the season would probably be an understatement.
While UF (62-2, 27-1 Southeastern Conference) was ranked No.13 at the start of the 2008 season, even the team couldn't have predicted the success they have had this season.
"No one expects us to do anything because our program has never been in this position before," senior Mary Ratliff said.
The Gators will face No.4 seed Georgia Tech (31-29, 9-11 Atlantic Coast Conference) Friday at 6 p.m. to start out the NCAA Regionals. It's the Yellow Jackets seventh straight NCAA Tournament appearance.
Tech, who were 10-21 on March 20, were able to finish the season by winning 21 of their last 29 games on their way to a fourth-place finish in the ACC.
The Jackets enter the tournament on a high note, having won 14 of their last 17 games including seven wins over teams ranked in the RPI top 50.
They are 0-3 all time against UF.
As a result of their No.1 seed, the Gators will not have to leave home until the Women's College World Series should they advance in the tournament.
A home-field advantage means a lot more now than it has in the past.
Thanks to the team's success this season, the football- and basketball-fixated fans of Gainesville have discovered the wonderful world of softball.
"Everybody loves a winner and it doesn't matter what you're playing," UF coach Tim Walton said. "People support winners."
Ratliff says she has seen quite a change in the home crowds since the beginning of the season.
"Watching our crowds develop over the season has been incredible," she said. "We have a whole lot of fans that are into every pitch now. It's been a lot of fun to watch."
The Gators, who are coming off a regular season full of unprecedented success, aren't dwelling on the fact that they enter the tournament riding a 35-game winning streak.
"I didn't know we'd won 35 in a row until you just told me," said Ratliff after media told her of the team's streak . "Our goal is to win every game. Our goal at the beginning of the season was to win 50 games. When we set that goal we were kind of like, I don't know 50 is a lot of games. Now we look back and we've won 62 games and we're kind of like, wow … we did not expect to be here."
The Gators last loss came back on March 12, a1-0 defeat at Alabama.
Though it may seem like a lifetime since that loss to the Tide, Ratliff said that the team isn't worrying about about anything except the next game.
"If you're dwelling about what you did before … if you're thinking about how good or how bad you were before, you're going nowhere," she said. "Bad at bats? Forget about them. Errors? Forget about them. For us it's about living in the present, living now and staying focused."
Quite a bit has changed since Walton arrived in Gainesville in 2006. The coach admitted that in the beginning he even had a hard time selling his program to in-state recruits.
"To be honest with you, when I first got here it was really difficult to recruit in this state," he said. " Kids were going to other programs in the SEC because they had won. We lost a lot of blue-chip kids."
Walton said that the success of the football and men's basketball programs have done a lot for his team.
"There's a buzz now," Walton said."Florida's got the name and now we have the product on the field to go with it. Kids are going to want to be here."
While the Gators have come a long way in the last few years, there is still a long way to go. Walton said that getting to the Women's College World Series would validate everything his team has worked for this season.
"We're on this stage now, but we're still an underdog," he said. "We haven't won anything that matters yet on a national level."
