Before the Division I Women’s Basketball Championship bracket is revealed tonight at 7 on ESPN, the student-athletes, coaches and fans are sure to feel a wide-range of emotions.

When the questions begin flying about a team that didn’t make the field or where teams that did are seeded, the person with the answers will be NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee Chair Judy Southard.

This is the second straight year that Southard has the responsibility to explain the committee’s decisions. She will be well prepared, especially since the 10-person committee has collectively watched about 2,000 games this season.

Criticism will come, but it doesn’t detract Southard’s feelings about being part of this committee.

“This has been one of, if not the most, professionally enriching experiences I’ve had,” said Southard, who is a senior associate athletics director at LSU. “What makes it unique is the camaraderie built up between this group of professionals. The collective mix of the challenges and the responsibility is what makes it rewarding for me.”

This is her fourth year of service on the committee, and she knows some familiar thoughts will occur when the bracket is finished sometime this afternoon.

“After that initial sense of relief that the bracket is done comes that state of anxiety awaiting the reactions,” Southard said. “We are all human. We know deep inside it’s a no-win situation in some regards, because you can’t please all the people all the time.”

During a lunch break on Sunday afternoon, Southard took some time to talk about the atmosphere in the selection room. Every year brings a set of different challenges, she said. At this point in the process, the committee was being thorough about seeding.

“This year we seem to have a large grouping of teams that will be sliding into lines 6 through 10,” said Southard, who has one more year of service on the committee. “Those teams look so very similar. We’ve had to spend so much time drilling down into seeding teams.”

 Perhaps this will be one of the questions she will answer tonight during several of her media obligations. After plowing through the information to construct the tournament field for four days, she will try to anticipate the inquiries that will come the committee’s way.

“It can be stressful because it all comes at the end of a very arduous task,” Southard said. “You are dealing with a certain amount of fatigue. As the chair, you have to be on your toes because that is when the greatest amount of media pressure comes.”

This is the third year that the women’s bracket will be revealed on Monday. Southard believes that has been a positive for the women’s game.

“The bottom line is we have our own forum now,” Southard said. “We know we are going to get an hour-long selection show. We are also going to get some dedicated coverage in the media on Tuesday.”

At the end of the day, all the criticisms and long hours put into the process are all worth it since the goal is to enhance the experience of student-athletes.

After the Women’s Final Four in Tampa April 6-8, Southard will throw herself back into her day job at LSU.

“Once February rolls around, that is when I have a sense of guilt because my spring sports schedule on campus,” Southard said. “I’ll spend several weekends making the rounds and catching up with everyone. I don’t think there is a way for the external constituents to understand what the sense of commitment is and what a time demand it is to be on the committee.”