EUGENE -- The top-seeded team in the NCAA softball tournament plays in a 78-year-old relic of a ballpark with portable toilets, a concourse that is shared with a driveway and above-ground dugouts that block the view of four rows of seats.



This team, which has held onto its first No. 1 ranking for five weeks, plays in a climate so wet that this season's opening six weeks were played in Sun Belt cities far from Howe Field.



Want to watch the Oregon Ducks, the nation's best team at the moment, play on television? Better hope it's an early first pitch: The ballpark's outfield lights don't meet broadcast standards,which means extra lights must be rented for night games.



It takes some serious imagination to look past those reasons (and more) why Oregon shouldn't be a contender and yet still envision the success that has brought the Ducks their first top NCAA seed in program history. Starting Friday, UO hosts the Eugene Regional and faces Utah Valley at 5 p.m. The regional includes Wisconsin and Albany. Oregon hasn't lost an NCAA regional game in two years.



"I told them I was going to get to the World Series in the first four years," head coach Mike White said. "It's gone quicker than I thought it would, but I don't like losing."



It's here that White turns up the corners of his mustache into a smile before delivering the secret of Oregon's success like a batting practice strike: The team's imagination is as much a key as hitting (UO's .347 batting average is third-best in the country) and pitching (its 1.85 ERA ranks 14th).



White presented his team with a poster each of the last two seasons that turned his goal into something his team could visualize. Two years ago, before Oregon advanced to its first Women's College World Series since 1989, he took a photo of the WCWS stadium in Oklahoma City and digitally changed the color of the uniforms into UO's green-and-yellow.



"I showed it to them and said, 'Make it a reality,'" White said. "The first time I did it we came out and made it."



In 2013, his stated goal was the Ducks' first conference title.



"I Photoshopped a ring with 'Pac-12 champions' and said 'Soon to be,'" said White, who is the only Oregon softball coach to be named the Pac-12's top coach. "And that happened."



In his five seasons White has sold his players -- now two-time Pac-12 champions -- on a series of visions to break the notion they are limited by facilities, weather or doubt. So far, all the visions have come true.



Here again, White smiles. His latest visions are his most ambitious yet.



***



Courtney Ceo finds it all a little funny that she and her red-hot bat have played such a dramatic role in Oregon's turnaround. In 2009, she was a high school recruit and one of White's biggest skeptics.



Now Ceo is a senior third-baseman whose .481 batting average is third-best in the NCAA and would tie a single-season program record. She embodies Oregon's free-swinging success yet is a walking history lesson for her younger teammates as one of the two remaining recruits of White's predecessor, Kathy Arendsen. Catcher Alexa Peterson is the other.



Starting in 2003, Arendsen -- who like White has been inducted into various Halls of Fame for her pitching career -- led Oregon to an NCAA regional in her first five seasons. White was her pitching coach in 2003 and 2004 before resigning. He considered jobs at Washington and Oregon State but ultimately coached his daughters and offered lessons. Arendsen's contract was not renewed after a 16-34 season in 2009, however, and White returned.



"When any new coach comes in everyone all of the sudden perks up and is a little suspicious and says, 'Who is this person?'" said Ceo, whose first conversation with White came after she'd undergone the first of two ACL surgeries in her career. "I had heard some different things about him. But I knew right away that he and the coaching staff were coaches I wanted to play for. They talked about being a family."



The two bonded because each was taken aback by the attitude inside Oregon's clubhouse upon arrival. Oregon's run to a 2010 super regional caught many off guard -- but Ceo didn't think that would include many Ducks' players, too.



"It was like a surprise when we got to the postseason and that for me was a little difficult and weird after being on teams that weren't necessarily the best but everyone wanted to win."



The problem was not the players' abilities, but their belief. That inferiority complex was reinforced by Oregon's outdated stadium, a 3-18 conference record in 2009 and the deja vu of making an early exit from the NCAA tournament each time Arendsen took them there.



"It's one thing not to have the player personnel but if I see us having the personnel that I think are able to do it then it's just a mental shift," said White, a native New Zealander who became a U.S. citizen in 1995. "That was the deal. We had to shift the mental approach and the way we thought about ourselves and our abilities to play in this conference. It was almost like, 'We didn't get to go to UCLA, now we're at Oregon.' They're talking themselves into second place! ... Right now we have the players who believe they can play."



A key was to not only realize Oregon could play with anyone, but discover it was bitterly upset when it didn't. The loss that stings most? Last season's defeat to Nebraska, at Howe Field, in the super regional.



"It was like sleeping with a rock under your pillow for six months," White said.



Ace Cheridan Hawkins said the frustration from losing at home, one step from a second straight WCWS bid, didn't dissipate until February.



Rather than carry that weight into this season, Oregon (49-7-1) has released its stress by rarely slowing down. There is energy and movement in the outfield before games, where Oregon routinely dances in left field during warmups; there is motion on the bases, where Oregon's .347 team batting average is set to smash its program record of .329 set last season; and there is movement on Hawkins' devious pitches, which rise and fall as if of their own accord.



Asked to describe her season, Hawkins chose "fun." Her opponents might use another term -- Hawkins' 30-4 record is the third-most victories by an Oregon pitcher in a single season.





Head coach Mike White is 222-73-1 in four seasons as Oregon head coach entering the 2014 NCAA tournament's Eugene Regional.

"When the music stops and they cross that line they're all game face," said Peg Rees, a former UO softball player who estimates she hasn't missed a home game in 21 years as Howe Field's public address announcer. "Mike's found a way to have them focus when the game is on and allow them to be young and fun and enjoy what they're doing in and around the serious business of a quality program. I don't know how you create that kind of a culture unless it just comes naturally to you."



Oregon is 21-0 when leading after the first inning, and 32-0 after the second. Like the rain at Howe Field, its offense is steady and prone to coming down in bursts. On April 18, Oregon routed Cal after scoring 15 runs in the fourth inning. The success is raising the team's profile and those of its assistants, too. Three of the last four years, a White assistant has left to become a head coach.



Though Oregon has danced its way to the top and, just last weekend, celebrated its second straight Pac-12 title by jumping into a Tucson, Ariz., hotel pool, the Ducks have yet to officially crack the ranks of softball's established elite. Only 11 programs have combined to win the 32 NCAA Division I softball championships.



That's a sobering statistic for any softball upstart, and one that has Oregon -- a team that identifies with being comfortable in its own skin -- turning to its imagination again. It's not just posters and White's Photoshop skills. It's T-shirts, too, that are emblazoned in each player's personalized superhero.



"Mine's Spin Slayer," said Hawkins, who chose a name that evokes her pitches' movement. She strikes out 9.7 batters per seven innings, ninth-best in the country.



"The idea is when you leave the locker room you leave everything behind and you don't bring it out on the field. You're a superhero out here."



***



Oregon's success has opened doors in living rooms across the country for White's recruiting and has helped land Jenna Lilley, an Ohio shortstop considered the nation's top class of 2014 player. He now recruits players who have yet to even play in high school.



To each, he sells the same vision of new softball facilities.



Except, it isn't much of a "new" pitch.



"It's something that we were told when we were coming in," Ceo said. "It'll come, eventually. This is our home until we get a new one and we take pride in this even if it's not up to everyone else's standard."



Few disagree at Oregon. The chorus of support for a new stadium or indoor facility extends from the athletic department to the office of campus planning, where Chris Ramey is vice president of planning and real estate. As an Oregon fan and university architect, Ramey has been underwhelmed by Howe Field for more than two decades.



"You really only have to go there to look at it and realize," Ramey said, "we can do better than this."



Craig Pintens, a senior associate athletic director for marketing and public relations, estimates the project would cost $15 million and says that Oregon does not have stadium plans nor has it land ready to build on. Whether it comes to fruition or not, Oregon's ideal scenario is to place a new stadium near the athletic complex at Autzen Stadium in order to keep softball players close to the weight room, treatment facility and indoor multi-purpose Moshofsky Center.



"We will get a new facility here, it's just a matter of when," White said. "But it is on the drawing board, it's next on the block. That's going to help us in recruiting as well with having a new stadium and having a new hitting facility. That's the big thing right now is getting our own facility so that instead of us coming out here and it's raining it takes us 20-30 minutes to pack up and go to the other side of campus."



Ramey says campus planning has three to four potential locations in mind both on and off-campus for a future stadium but the university has grown to the point that "we don't have any bare ground."



The Science Factory and a BMX track currently sit on two pieces of city-owned land just south of Autzen Stadium across from Leo Harris Parkway, and a parking lot north of the stadium, along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, could be another option. According to the city, all three properties' zoning likely allows for use of a stadium. Howe Field's current site, meanwhile, is likely not an option because it's hemmed in on each side -- UO warns those who park down the right-field line that cars can be pelted by foul balls -- and is sitting on land prized for potential academic use just 20 yards away from McArthur Court.



"You just never say never," Ramey said, "but you can't help but think that's a pretty attractive location for academics."



The former UO basketball arena now holds temporary offices for student groups, bathrooms for those unwilling to use the rented toilets, a locker room for the softball team and, often, fans fleeing Howe's grandstands during rain delays.



"If we could (build a stadium) on a decent schedule we could probably get it done in two years," Ramey said. "But keep in mind there are all kinds of complications."



Those complications leave Rees ready to believe only when she sees a shovel in the ground.



"When Kathy Arendsen got the job she showed me architectural renderings of what the new stadium would look like," Rees said. "The athletic department had plans with Oregon brands on them. They were promising her in her first year this would happen soon. I feel like I'm skeptical enough to feel like that will never happen. Do I want that to happen? That would be awesome, because that's what's happening to the SEC, where the softball facilities are remarkable.



"This is the No. 1 team in the country. We have to do better than have Porta-Potties near the field."



***



No rise is without its bumps, White likes to remind visitors.



He points to Ceo's torn ACL, the last of which happened in the middle of Oregon's 2012 WCWS run. Early this season, starting second baseman Danica Mercado broke her leg, and forced Karine Shaver into her place. And the biggest problem of all was replacing Jessica Moore as Oregon's starting pitcher after she graduated last spring with nearly every UO pitching record in her name.



In the low moments, Oregon's players say they walk into their locker room underneath McArthur Court and are buoyed by the posters of past seasons whose once far-fetched dreams of Oklahoma City's ASA Hall of Fame Stadium and a Pac-12 title ring are displayed in prescient, glossy fashion.



"If you're having a bad day and can't remember why you're here it's an easy reminder with that ring up on the wall," Hawkins said. "I love being able to walk in and see Oregon jerseys on an Oklahoma City field."



White would have unveiled his latest poster sooner but, in February, he sensed Oregon was already plenty motivated by the 2013 season-ending loss to Nebraska.



Now on the eve of the first NCAA tournament where Oregon softball has a "1" next to its name, his goal is to see it end that way.



"This year," White said, framing an invisible poster with his hands, "I'm seeing us holding the championship trophy."

-- Andrew Greif | @andrewgreif