The NCAA bids, seedings, and regional assignments were announced earlier this evening. I have spent the last couple of hours in a labor of love, making the following geographically focused diagrams of the teams assigned to the 16 regional sites. As can be seen in the diagrams below, many of the regionals are geographically compact, thus minimizing travel expenses, whereas others are not. A more conventional region-by-region listing of teams is available here from Ultimate College Softball.

The shocker of the evening is that Arizona State, the Pac 10 conference champion and No. 1 team in the nation for much of the season in at least one of the polls, was dealt a No. 6 seed. UCLA (No. 2 seed) and Michigan (No. 4 seed) did better than I would have expected, but since I have degrees from both of these schools, I won't complain.

Here are the geography-based diagrams. You can click on any of them to enlarge them.





[CORRECTION: The region with Georgia (UGa), North Carolina (UNC), Campbell, and BYU is actually being hosted by UNC, even though UGa is the nationally seeded team.]