Baseball & Softball Happenings

Other sports do exist besides football at the University of Alabama and the Crimson Tide have been doing pretty well in some of them lately.

Alabama baseball won their league leading 14th SEC Championship last week after sweeping Tennessee in a three game series (and getting a little help from Georgia who took two out of three games with Kentucky.) The Wildcats are conference co-champions with the Tide this year.

The Crimson Tide finished with a 39-17 regular season record (20-10 SEC) and earned the #1 seed in the SEC tournament. Eventhough the team crashed out of the SEC tournament in the final four, their performance was good enough to earn them a #4 national seed for the NCAA tournament. The high national seeding is important, because if Alabama wins its regional (which is being held in Tuscaloosa), then it will host the super regional on June 9-12.

Alabama's regional features the Troy Trojans, Southern Miss Golden Eagles, and the Jacksonville State Gamecocks. All of the chairback seats at the 6,118-seat Sewell-Thomas Stadium are sold out for the regional. A limited amount of bleacher seating is still available.

Crimson Tide center fielder Emeel Salem has been racking up a plethora of honors both on the field and in the classroom lately. So far, he's been named to the ESPN the Magazine Academic All-American team (3.9 GPA with a double major of management and Spanish), SEC Baseball Scholar Athlete of the Year, 2006 SEC Good Works Team (community service award), College Baseball Foundation All-American Team.  Salem has a .362 average, 2 HR, 27 RBI, 63 runs, 6 triples, and 33 stolen bases.  Congrats to Emeel.

In only their 10th season, Alabama softball won the SEC championship for the first time. They won their regional and super regional (both in Tuscaloosa) to advance to the College World Series. The softball team takes on Northwestern on June 1st in the College World Series. The game is being televised on ESPN2 at 6PM.