Scott

Eight qualifiers out of 64 teams will be selected for the actual tournament.

The College World Series has certainly evolved into a television extravaganza that culminates athletic activities for any school year.

The week-long sportathon has moved from 23,000-seat Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium to its current home at 23,000-seat Charles Swab Stadium.

This year, the eight teams come from seven different conferences. The Southeastern Conference (SEC) has two qualifiers in LSU and Arkansas but such outliers as Murray State (Kentucky) have also scrambled their way to college baseball’s holy grail.

Manoah

Omaha has always been spoken of in reverential terms by college players. Where the NCAA Division I field has steadily grown from the long-gone years when only 27 teams were selected to play in eight District Tournaments, now the field is winnowed slowly away until just eight teams can slog their way to the CWS.

West Virginia University has never seen one of its teams make it through all the way to Omaha. Some would say that is better for the ego than the track record of Florida State, which has been to the holy grail some 24 times and each year has trooped back to the humidity of Tallahassee without a championship. That’s 0-24 in Omaha for the baseball-happy Seminoles.

In both 2024 and 2025 the Mountaineers claimed Regional championships, but were then stopped at the next level at a Super Regional.– first against North Carolina in Chapel Hill and then in Baton Rouge against Louisiana State. Louisiana State has already won seven national championships.

Mountaineer teams are no strangers to the NCAA Tournament atmosphere, often qualifying as the champions of the old Southern Conference.

In the early 1960s, West Virginia annually made the bus trip from Morgantown to Gastonia, NC to compete in the District III tournament where it was joined by the champions of the Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference and independent team — usually Florida State. The District champion moved straightway to the CWS in Omaha. Coach Steve Harrick and his Mountaineers were there when Duke (1961) and Florida State (1962 and 1963) eliminated the likes of Florida and Wake Forest to reach Omaha on the banks of the Missouri River, across from Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Grove

West Virginia was the acknowledged king of the Southern Conference.

Today’s Mountaineers make their mark in the scattered Big 12 Conference, where they shared that league’s regular season championship in 2024 and then won it outright in 2025.

Former Mountaineers currently on Major League rosters are Victor Scott, Ryan Bergert and Kade Strowd with pitchers Alek Manoah, John Means and Michael Grove on the injured lists of their respective Major League teams.

The more recent national success of WVU teams has piqued the interests of the crowds who now flock to the comfortable stadium in Granville to watch the Mountaineers even on the cloud-covered afternoons and evenings of days when the temperatures never get out of the 50s.

Strowd

Means

Bergert