As the 2025/26 Player of the Year race heats up, Tuesday's NCAA women's basketball conference awards teased the front-runners for this year's national honors.
The Big Ten named UCLA center Lauren Betts its Big Ten Player of the Year (PoY) and, for the second season in a row, the Bruins' star also collected the conference's Defensive Player of the Year (DPoY) award.
Also running it back this year is Notre Dame's Hannah Hidalgo, who became the first-ever ACC player to earn both PoY and DPoY in back-to-back seasons. Even more, the junior guard continued her iron grip on the ACC's defensive title — an honor Hidalgo has won in all three of her NCAA seasons.
For the second year in a row, a TCU transfer and a West Virginia standout scored the Big 12's top honors, as Hidalgo's former teammate Olivia Miles took home the conference's PoY title in her first season as a Horned Frog, while Mountaineer senior Jordan Harrison earned the DPoY award.
Meanwhile in the SEC, Vanderbilt sophomore and reigning Division I scoring leader Mikayla Blakes rose to the top of the NCAA's deepest conference to win PoY, while South Carolina's Raven Johnson capped her senior year with the Gamecocks as the SEC's DPoY.
"I just want to do whatever my team needed me to do and put me in that position to be able to win," Blakes said this week.
With a brand-new NCAA basketball PoY guaranteed this year after a March Madness injury benched USC's 2024/25 winner JuJu Watkins for the season, fans can expect UConn stars Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd to remain in the mix alongside national shortlist leaders Betts, Blakes, and Hidalgo as Big East conference awards emerge later this week.
The 2025 Women's College World Series begins today, with the sport's most prestigious organizations taking advantage of this week's NCAA softball spotlight to bestow awards on the season's top athletes.
Arkansas first baseman Bri Ellis earned USA Softball's 2025 Collegiate Player of the Year title on Tuesday, with the senior beating out a shortlist that included Nebraska pitcher Jordy Bahl and Texas Tech ace NiJaree Canady — who won the award in her 2024 sophomore season.
A menace at the plate, Ellis led the NCAA in on-base (.639) and slugging percentages (1.090). She finished the year with 26 home runs — the third-most in the nation — while racking up 72 RBIs, both setting single-season records for the Razorbacks.
Wednesday saw both Bahl and Canady take home hardware of their own, with the National Fastpitch Coaches Association naming the Nebraska redshirt junior their 2025 National Player of the Year while the Texas Tech transfer snagged Pitcher of the Year for the second straight season.
A two-time national champion with Oklahoma before transferring to the Cornhuskers, Bahl is the only player to rank in the Top 10 for both batting average and ERA, claiming multiple program records at the plate while tossing 26 wins from the circle. This season, she became just the fifth Division I athlete to ever record 20+ wins and 20+ home runs in a single campaign.
Another two-way titan, Canady leads the nation with a lights-out 0.89 ERA on the season, allowing a Division I-low of 3.65 hits per seven innings while leading the Red Raiders in long-ball production with 11 home runs.
How to watch the winners of the 2025 college softball awards
Despite their individual achievements, only Canady's Texas Tech survived last weekend's Super Regionals, meaning fans must wait until the 2026 NCAA season to catch rising Nebraska senior Bahl back in action.
It's a shorter wait to watch Ellis, however, as the Arkansas grad will begin her pro career with the Talons in the brand-new Athletes Unlimited Softball League, which starts its inaugural season on June 7th.
As for Canady, she'll look to take the Red Raiders on a deep run in Oklahoma City. No. 12-seed Texas Tech will face unseeded Ole Miss in both teams' first-ever WCWS game at 7 PM ET on Thursday, airing live on ESPN2.