BRONX, N.Y. - (May 17, 2010) - Fresh off a run at the Atlantic 10 Championship title, the Fordham Rams will make school history as they make their first-ever trip to the NCAA Softball Championships. Fordham, an at-large bid, will face University of Maryland in the first round of the Regionals which begin on Friday, May 21.  Fordham will play Maryland in the night game, starting approximately at 7 p.m. Fordham will be the home team in the contest. Oklahoma and Syracuse will play at 5 p.m.

Fordham (47-10) is among 11 teams making its first-ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament, claiming one of the 34 at-large bids after finishing runner-up at the A-10 Championship last week.

The Fordham softball team along with family, friends and media gathered at Dagger John's Grille on Fordham's Rose Hill Campus to watch the selection show, which aired live on ESPNU. Head Coach Bridget Orchard was one of the featured coaches on the national broadcast, as she was interviewed by host Cara Capuano and analysts Cheri Kempf and Michele Smith.

The Softball Rams are only the second ever women's team in school history to make an NCAA Championship. The last time was when the women's basketball team received an automatic bid in 1994 as the Patriot League Champions.

This is the second time the Atlantic 10 Conference has had two teams in the NCAA Championships. The last time was in 2004, with Massachusetts getting an at-large bid, while Temple received the automatic bid. Besides Temple in 2004, UMass has been the only school from the A-10 to represent the league at the NCAA Championship since 1994.
 

In the College Park Regional, Fordham will face the Terrapins, who also received an at-large bid; Syracuse, who won the BIG EAST Championship title; and Oklahoma, who was designated the top team in the region with a No. 14 overall seeding.

The University of Alabama was named the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Division I Softball Championship today when the NCAA Division I Softball Committee announced the 64-team field. The Crimson Tide, champions of the Southeastern Conference, are 48-9 and will play Alcorn State University, an automatic qualifier from the Southwestern Athletic Conference, May 21, in front of a home crowd in Tuscaloosa.

Thirty conferences were awarded automatic qualification, and the remaining 34 slots were filled with at-large selections to complete the bracket. The top 16 teams were seeded nationally and will play at campus sites this weekend.

Team pairings were determined by geographical proximity, with the exception that teams from the same conference were not paired during regional competition, when possible.

The Big 12 Conference, the Pacific-10 Conference and the SEC led all conferences with seven teams in the championship. The Atlantic Coast Conference placed five in the championship. California State University, Fresno, remains the only team to be selected to all 29 championships. Nine teams are making their initial appearances in the tournament: University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alcorn State University, Bucknell University, Elon University, Fordham University, Lipscomb University, McNeese State University, St. Mary's College of California and University of Virginia.

Only 10 schools have been crowned the NCAA Division I softball champion since the tournament started in 1982, and nine are in this year's bracket.

Fordham has been successful all season, ending with an RPI of 30, a school-record of 47 wins, among a collection of individual and Atlantic 10 Championship records. The Rams have received votes in the national top 25 polls since March 2. Fordham also ended the regular season on a 19-game win streak. The Rams extended their win streak to 21 games before losing to Massachusetts in the Atlantic 10 Championship Final.