The story behind UCLA softball's vacated 1995 national championship

The Bruins are the most decorated program in NCAA softball history, but a bizarre series of events deprived them of a 13th national title

By any measurement, UCLA is college softball royalty, a program that’s synonymous with the sport and its history.

The Bruins have won 12 NCAA championships, four more than the next-closest schools. Their 35 Women’s College World Series appearances lead all Division I programs. Unlike the school’s men’s basketball program – which has the most titles in Division I, but did so largely behind the work of a historically unmatched 12-year run that’s now a half-century in the rearview mirror – UCLA softball has remained nationally relevant and competitive throughout its history, with at least one championship in each of the previous four decades.

This week, the Bruins are back in the Women’s College World Series, marking their ninth appearance in the past 10 years that the event was held. As the fifth-highest-ranked squad in an eight-team field, they’ll be a decided underdog to leave Oklahoma City with as a national champion, though they got off to a strong start Thursday with a walk-off win against Oregon in their opening game.

In the process, UCLA will look to win a title 30 years after it lost one.

The Bruins’ aforementioned championship count doesn’t include their 1995 NCAA title, which capped off a 50-6 season before being vacated two years later by the NCAA after an investigation uncovered that UCLA illegally gave out more scholarships than the NCAA permitted.

Outside of Louisville men’s basketball, UCLA softball is perhaps the highest-profile, most consequential program to ever be stripped of an NCAA championship. An accomplishment that was supposed to stay with the program and everyone associated with it forever was only theirs for 23 months.

How the Bruins came to lose it is one of the stranger sagas in NCAA history.

The championship that never was

In 1975, a nascent UCLA softball program that was about to begin its first season turned to an Anaheim high school teacher named Sharron Backus to lead it.

It was only a part-time gig and the pay wasn’t particularly good – about $1,500 a year, which prompted Backus to hold on to her job at the high school while overseeing a Division I program – but what came from that modest arrangement was a dynasty.

Behind Backus’ guidance, the Bruins became a softball juggernaut, winning seven national championships from 1982, the first year the NCAA sponsored softball, to 1992 and playing for the NCAA title on two other occasions.

By 1995, their outlook had changed a bit. UCLA was still among the best programs in the nation, but it had started to be surpassed even within its own conference, with Arizona winning three of the four national championships from 1991-94. In two of those three title years, the Wildcats beat the Bruins in the championship (to its credit, UCLA won it all during the one year in that span that Arizona didn’t).

If Backus’ program felt the need to reassert itself coming off back-to-back Wildcats championships in 1993 and 1994, it did a pretty good job of it.

What was already an excellent UCLA team became even more of a machine in March of that season, when 23-year-old Australian star Tanya Harding joined the team 20 games into the season (given that it was one year after the famous drama around the 1994 Winter Olympics, damn near every article written about Harding during this time notes her name being nearly identical to the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding).

Though she joined the team too late to be seriously considered for any of the major national awards, Harding was as overpowering as any college pitcher that season. In 19 appearances, she went 17-1 with a 0.50 ERA, 18 complete games, 13 shutouts and 121 strikeouts to only 20 walks. She was at her best in her team’s biggest games of the season, striking out 20 batters while posting a 0.75 ERA in 28 innings across four Women’s College World Series games, all while batting .500 and driving in six runs as a hitter.

Behind Harding’s arm and a talented lineup, UCLA earned a date with Arizona in the national championship. Harding was yet again stellar, allowing just three hits to the top four batters of Arizona’s order, a quartet that had combined for 70 homers that season. With the game tied at two in the bottom of the fifth inning, UCLA’s Kelly Howard hit a two-run homer. That lead was never seriously threatened, with Harding only giving up one baserunner the rest of the game to lift her squad to a victory over a Wildcats team that was 66-5 entering the day.

“The sweetness is beating a very, very talented team,” UCLA co-head coach Sue Enquist said after the game, according to an account from the Associated Press. “We beat a team everybody said was unbeatable on this day.”

The Bruins only got to bask in their championship glow for so long.