There are roughly 4,495 colleges in the United States. That’s a statistic that students at a large, nationally ranked, relatively well-funded public university like UCSD tend to forget, because most of us applied to other large, nationally renowned public universities. But it’s something that’s hard to neglect in the realm of Division II softball, where big name universities take a backseat and where the landscape of creatively named, small higher education institutions moves to the forefront.