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The Virginia Tech softball team will compete in the 2026 NCAA Tournament. It will not get an opportunity to host the opening round of play.
The Hokies will instead travel to Baton Rouge for its regional. A scheduling conflict was referenced after the snub.
Did graduation prevent Virginia Tech from hosting? The selection committee says no.
Virginia Tech softball will not host.
The Hokies were one of the ACC’s best teams in 2026, winning 46 of their 56 games to finish third in the league standings.
After completing regular season, Virginia Tech made a run to the conference championship game where it fell 2-1 to Florida State. Head coach Pete D’Amour spoke on his team’s resume after the fact.
“I mean, what else do we need to do?” he asked. “We beat the teams we were supposed to, the teams in front of us. I think the resume speaks for itself.
“We’ve been able to hang all year, and I think we proved it… We played well against a team that’s been picked to host regionals all year (Duke). We boosted our resume. It’s pretty darn good.”
It was not good enough. Virginia Tech was left out of the Top 16 seeds despite boasting a Top 16 national ranking. LSU was picked as the final host site. The Hokies will travel to Baton Rouge as a top 2-seed.
Why were the Hokies snubbed?
Sam Mostow of Tech Sidelines wrote about the selection committee’s decision on Sunday. Virginia Tech did enter a bid to be considered as a regional host.
That request was denied. Many believe the refusal was related to a scheduling conflict.
NCAA Division I Softball Committee chair Natalie Honnen said Virginia Tech’s bid to host a regional was denied. The university’s graduation conflicts with a potential regional in Blacksburg, and Honnen said it was unable to secure hotels within the mandated 30-mile or 45-minute radius of Tech Softball Park.
The school will host graduation on regional weekend. As a result, local hotels are booked up. It limits the university’s ability to accommodate visitors.
The selection committee chair, however, did not say the conflict was the cause for the snub. Instead, she insisted that the Hokies were simply not one of the nation’s Top 16 teams.
“What I’m saying is that Virginia Tech was not a Top 16 seed. So, from a host perspective, if there was a situation that Tech was in the top 16, they were not going to be able to host because the locations of the hotels were outside of our parameters — but that did not come into our thought process when we were seeding the top 16.”
-Natalie Honnen
Honnen did reference the hotel limitations. Had the committee considered the Hokies a Top 16 team, they still wouldn’t have hosted.
That did not enter their thought process, though, at least according to the chair. RPI and strength of schedule were the leading factors in the omission.
Each host school had a better RPI than Virginia Tech, which came in at No. 18. The Hokies were not rewarded for beating up on lesser opponents. Their schedule ranked 57th nationally with a non-conference standing of 152nd.
There’s an argument to be made on each side. Virginia Tech performed much better than LSU in terms of Quad 1 games. The Hokies were 8-4 to the Tigers’ 11-16.
LSU, however, tested itself more often. Virginia Tech did not. As a result, the two teams will face off in Baton Rouge, though based on the committee chair’s response to the seeding, it wouldn’t have made a difference due to the graduation conflict.