Defending National Champion Florida Gators Lead List Of Top College Teams Competing
Austin, TX (Dec. 7, 2015) – FloSports today announced that FloSoftball has partnered with the Mary Nutter Classic to live stream and archive the games of this year’s tournament in Palm Springs, Calif.
The Mary Nutter Classic is the nation’s largest and most prestigious preseason college softball tourney, featuring 48 top Division I teams. For the first time this year, the event will be spread over two weekends – Feb. 19-21 and Feb. 25-28.
The lineup of teams includes last season’s Women’s College World Series finalists, Florida and Michigan, who finished No. 1 and 2 in the country, respectively, as well as four other Top 10 teams: LSU (4), UCLA (5), Oregon (7) and Oklahoma (9).
“If you’re a softball fan – particularly college softball – and you want to see the highest level of play, the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic is the ideal event,” said Brentt Eads, general manager of FloSoftball. “It’s a privilege for us to show these games live and on-demand, and to be associated with such talented players, coaches and teams.”
A combined 14 of the Top 25 teams in the final 2015 USA Today/NFCA Coaches poll will participate in the Mary Nutter Classic, which began in 2004 and whose namesake was a softball icon as a player, coach and director of softball coaches’ clinics across the U.S.
“I am ecstatic to partner the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic with FloSoftball to bring a whole new audience and exposure to the best collegiate softball tourney in the nation,” said Kirk Walker, the Mary Nutter Classic co-event producer along with Deb Hartwig of JustSOFTBALL. “I look forward to working with a media company that is a leader in our sport and passionate about advancing the sport of fastpitch softball across the country.”
Every game of the Mary Nutter Classic will be available live and via replay exclusively on FloSoftball.com via FloPRO subscription, which offers unfettered access to live and archived footage of top club and college softball events, original documentaries on stars of the sport, a library of technique videos and more.
For more information, visit FloSoftball.com.
ABOUT FLOSPORTS
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Focused on three areas – live programming, original content, and owned and operated events – the company takes fragmented communities and provides them the platform to connect with the sports they love.
Through live streaming of premier events, original video programming, weekly studio shows, branded entertainment, and event creation and execution, FloSports is growing the sports, the athletes and the fans.
FloSports owns exclusive broadcast rights to in-demand events, and broadcasts more than 25,000 hours of live sporting events each year. From a content standpoint, FloSports has 1M+ videos in their library. FloSports features the #1 webcasts per sport, high-quality, in-depth documentary series and 5M+ athletes ranked within their respective sports.
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ABOUT THE MARY NUTTER COLLEGIATE CLASSIC
Kirk Walker, currently an assistant coach at UCLA, began the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic while serving at Oregon State, where he was the head softball coach for 18 years and is the winningest coach in Beavers’ history.
The tournament was run under the auspices of Oregon State until it became an independently owned and operated event starting in 2013, when Walker left OSU and returned to UCLA, where he also coached from 1984-94.
Deb Hartwig, who runs JustSOFTBALL, has been involved with the event from its first year and became part owner of the event in 2013.
The two weekends of softball competition are hosted at the Big League Dreams Complex in Cathedral City, Calif., which was selected because of the idyllic Southern California weather in February and its destination draw for fans and teams to the resort community.
It is estimated that the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic brings in more revenue to the businesses in the Coachella Valley than every other event except the Bob Hope PGA Classic.
Teams are selected and invited to create the highest RPI event in the country as well as creating a diverse regional mix of teams representing the entire country.