April Setterlund is one of the best athletes ever to play at BU. She has led the softball team to two straight NCAA tournament appearances. Coach Shawn Rychick called Setterlund “a real top-of the-order kid,” and she is. The senior broke the BU runs record and has stolen 22 out of 24 bases this year. 
She’s going to break BU’s RBI record this year and might be first on the home run list by the time she’s done. Because Setterlund has so thoroughly dominated throughout her BU career, pitchers rarely want to give her anything to hit. Yet she has a .392 average and gets on base in over half her at-bats.
Basically, if you picked April Setterlund in your America East softball fantasy league, well then you have a serious gambling problem and you’re doing something that’s highly illegal, but good pick.
As Setterlund tries to lead the softball team to a third-straight NCAA tournament, fellow senior Erica Baumgartner is also setting records for the BU lacrosse team. She broke the team assist record with her 109th in the team’s loss to the University of New Hampshire.
But that might not be the most impressive achievement of Baumgartner’s career, for she has not missed an NCAA Tournament yet at BU. And the team is gunning for an incredible seventh-straight title this season. Coach Liz Robertshaw’s program is inarguably the best at BU over the last several years.
Although the winter sports teams had a great year that culminated in a championship weekend that we’ll likely never see again, spring is BU’s time to dominate.
Part of what made that weekend in March so special was the fact that many of those winter teams had never been in that situation before.
We saw the first NCAA tournament game the women’s hockey team has ever hosted.
Agganis Arena held its first ever men’s basketball conference championship, and the women’s basketball and men’s hockey teams were also in action.
In the spring, there are none of those firsts, just wins and championships season-after-season. But even though spring is BU’s most successful sports season, it’s also the least popular.
That’s not necessarily a knock on BU. Even nationally, the only college sports stories you’ll hear over the next few months will be when some basketball coach vacates his Final Four appearance (quick! Calhoun or Calipari?) and when the Carolina Panthers take Jamarcus Ru – oops, Cam Newton with the first pick in the NFL Draft.
College sports are just off the map until football starts up in the fall – we’re a few hundred miles too far north for spring football to matter.
This clearly has nothing to do with the success of the teams. BU’s spring sports programs prove that. The spring disappearance of college sports also isn’t quite about the sports themselves.
The College World Series in Omaha, Neb. is one of the most exciting events we have in college sports. It’s like March Madness played in nice weather with round-robin tournaments and three-game series.
Baseball is one of the most popular sports in the country, yet the CWS isn’t a widely-relevant event on the national stage. And I know the ping of those aluminum bats is annoying, but the reason goes beyond that.
Going to see a college sports game is more about the social atmosphere for students than it is about the actual sports. A lot of kids go to football games on Saturdays because they’re an event, not because they have a passion for the game. If it was just sports nerds like me who filled the stands, no school would ever sell out their tickets.
But if you go to somewhere like Syracuse University, you head out to the Carrier Dome through the blizzards to support your team even if they are awful because that’s just what Syracuse students do. The success of the team, or to a certain extent the sport itself, is irrelevant. And in the spring, there are no sports left anywhere, not just at BU, that draw fans who don’t have a strong passion for the sport and the team.
Adding to the challenge for spring sports in Boston are the pros. The Red Sox are our home team starting in April, even if the BU softball team could probably put up 10 runs on John Lackey.
Four years ago when I was a high school senior, all the talk about academic toughness, low acceptance rates and opportunities for campus involvement were great to hear when considering schools. But what really sold me on BU was that I could go to a school where I could see the lights of Fenway Park from my dorm. How are our spring sports supposed to compete with that?
So the deck is clearly stacked against BU’s spring sports teams. But from the looks of it, that’s not going to keep them from winning.
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