The funny thing is, you probably won't think the Gators making the Women's College World Series is a big deal a couple years from now.
Tim Walton isn't going to all of a sudden turn his tucked in shirt, fairly clean-shaven look into a disheveled mess.
He isn't going to have his players stop dressing up for road games or cleaning up the softball stadium when he finds one - yes, just one - cup on the ground outside the team's locker room.
"This isn't a one-time thing," senior Mary Ratliff said. "This is going to be a yearly event. It's going to be a realistic goal every year from now on."
Just last season the softball program was giddy when they'd make a regional series. Heck, even win a game while they're there. Then they got to the decisive game in Super Regional play. Now they've won Super Regionals with a team that has one senior and nine freshmen.
Let's put it this way: Tim Walton cares about his players and is sensitive to what they go through - you have to be that way to a certain degree with collegiate female athletes. But by no means is he easy on them.
"This place will eat you up and spit you out," he said.
In other words, don't come here unless you want to challenge yourself. That means you don't get the lackadaisical students - like me sometimes - who just do enough in the classroom to get by. You don't get players who come to practice exactly on time and leave as soon as it's over. You don't get people who think it's a good idea to carry an open container of alcohol around downtown Gainesville while having a marijuana cigarette in your pocket. Stacey Nelson doesn't look like that big of a hippie, after all.
Walton's recruiting student athletes who smash the ball and smash test curves, pitchers who throw a hard rise ball and rise in society. When Kim Waleszonia was debating on whether to come back this semester after her father was dealing with cancer, Walton didn't promise Lester Waleszonia his daughter would win another All-American honor. He promised him that he'd make her graduate.
Urban Meyer and Billy Donovan can't make these promises with the same success. Most of their big-time recruits think they'll be running past NFL linebackers and have Gatorade begging them to say, "Is it in you?" on national TV. But when your sport lacks the big bucks of professional leagues, and people haven't praised you since your first layup or hit, it becomes easier to sell parents and students on a good life in front of a good program.
I'm far from certain that UF will win the world series this year. They were just heavily tested against a Pac-10 team, and the SEC simply doesn't have the guns right now that the Pac-10 and Big 12 do. But I am certain that the Gators will, someday sooner rather than later, have a program that will make the UCLAs and Californias blush. Walton wouldn't have eight girls from California - the hotbed for softball - on his roster if he wasn't building an impressive program.
The Gators will probably come home empty handed this year. But Jeremy Foley better start making room in his trophy case, because softball may very well end up being the best sports team year in and year out on this campus.
