It seemed to always end in a sea of red. Just as sailors can rely upon the light of the north star to guide them home, you could mark the end of the college softball season with a celebration from the Oklahoma Sooners upon Devon Park’s infield in the heart of Oklahoma City. The team has won eight national titles since its first in 2000, including four consecutive championships from 2021-24.
To get a sense of just how powerful this dynasty is, when the Sooners lost 3-2 to Texas Tech in the semifinal of the Women's College World Series this summer, non-OU softball fans across the Internet celebrated this as the end of the dynasty -- despite the team coming just one run shy of reaching the final for the fifth straight season.
The facilities are otherworldly, almost resembling an NFL team’s headquarters. Sooners players dominate the record books, too, with Jocelyn Alo holding the all-time NCAA home run record among men’s and women’s sports. Tiare Jennings, currently an assistant coach with the Sooners and the MVP for Team USA’s recent gold medal win at the World Games, holds the Women’s College World Series record for career RBIs and RBIs in a single tournament, and she’s tied with Alo for most home runs in a single WCWS run.
It’s a team with so much success, so much star power and so much sheer talent that at this weekend’s Home Run Derby X tournament in Oklahoma City, there will be one team that doesn’t feature the usual co-ed blend of Major League sluggers and women’s baseball and softball standouts. There will be one team with just Oklahoma Sooners, as superstars Alo, Jennings and Kinzie Hansen will once again don Sooner red and line up alongside each other.
Not just that, but two more current Sooners players -- Ella Parker and Kasidi Pickering -- will be joining Nick Swisher to represent the Yankees.
None of this, though, seemed possible when Sooners head coach Patty Gasso first took over the program in 1995.
Softball has always been important in Oklahoma. It’s why the sport’s Hall of Fame moved there from Newark, N.J., in 1970. But long before the Women’s College World Series was shown on TV, with sports bars packed with hungry softball fans -- and long before NIL money helped turn the game’s biggest stars into household names with loaded bank accounts -- the game existed on the fringes of popular culture. Gasso and the Sooners helped change all that.
But it took time.
“Oklahoma was a mess, to be quite honest,” Gasso said recently. Gasso had left Long Beach City College where she had coached for the previous four seasons, having to take a pay cut to move up to the Division I school -- something that seems impossible today.
Oklahoma was in a transition, too. The university had just fired its softball coach and the team was practicing with the school’s athletic director. Forget Devon Park’s world-class ballpark or Love’s Field -- the current 4,200-seat stadium on OU’s campus in Norman -- the team was practicing and playing games at a nearby city park field, one where they needed to be cleared off by 5 p.m. so the slow-pitch rec games could begin.
“My second year there, we hosted a regional at Reaves Park, which is a city park,” Gasso said. “The players could not all fit in the dugout, so they had to sit in the front row with the fans.”
Of course, at this time, there weren’t many fans, either: “There was only like 40 fans on each side,” Gasso said. “There weren’t a lot of people there watching.”
Nothing attracts fans like winning, though, and that was Gasso’s goal. Her first step was to establish a new standard of play, one which followed the same blue-collar approach which had defined her own playing career and time coaching at Long Beach City. She hit the junior college ranks and found overlooked players with a hunger to succeed.
“I worked them hard and they didn’t like it,” Gasso said. “I didn’t care. ‘Take your stuff and go home if you didn’t like it,’ kind of stuff. But the majority started to really buy in, and if you hadn’t bought in, you better figure out a way to get bought in or be gone.”
That helped kick-start the program, Oklahoma going on to win its first Women’s College World Series title in 2000.
Despite the success and accolades that have followed, Gasso’s outlook has remained the same.
“The standard never changes, the championship mindset never changes, and coach Gasso never changes,” Jennings said.
Jennings should know well: She won four WCWS titles with Gasso, was named MVP at the recent World Games in China under Gasso and now coaches alongside her longtime skipper during the college season.
“She's going to instill that same championship mindset, that standard for blue collar, hard-working, hustle, grit, integrity, responsibility, accountability, all those things," Jennings said. "It doesn't change for any new team.”
“I think that the culture that she establishes here is unmatched,” said Hansen, like Jennings, also a four-time Women’s College World Series champion and USA Softball teammate. “I don't really care what program you go to, that woman sets the tone from Day 1, and it is just so special, because she demands greatness out of you, not only on the field, but in the locker room, in the classroom, in the team room, in all areas of life. She pushes you to be a woman and be great in every way.”
While the 2000 WCWS championship changed many things -- Gasso was given a hefty raise, allowing her to stay in Norman, while the team’s platform was quickly elevated -- it took 11 more years for the trophy to return to Oklahoma.
This required Gasso to regroup, rethink and recruit better than ever. She focused on a new style of athlete and found a way to turn a small town in Oklahoma into the place that every Southern California slugger and standout would want to wind up on. A region that used to be a gimme for UCLA now became a stocked lake for Oklahoma to draw from.
The Orange County Batbusters, one of the most talented and respected teams in fastpitch softball history, are almost a Minor League feeder system for the Sooners. Alo, Jennings and Hansen all came from the Batbusters, as did current star and HRDX participant Parker.
Norman may be a far cry from L.A., but when you have a chance to represent Oklahoma softball -- the standard bearer for the game -- you do it.
“As soon as I stepped on campus, it was like I was meant to be here,” Parker said.
As for why OU stood out against the other programs?
“The way they played softball, it was fun. It was suffocating,” Parker, who is also Dodgers manager Dave Roberts niece, said. “Anyone they played, it was just like, ‘We’re gonna run through you, and we’re gonna have fun while doing it.’ That was just something that really enticed me to come here.”
Pickering, who will join Parker on the Yankees before the two return to school in the fall, also loves the way that the team plays, the way Gasso inspires her troops.
“She’s like, ‘Never take no,’ [or] ‘No surrender,” Pickering said. “And yet everyone also really loves her.”
“I do think you can be unapologetic, but it doesn’t give you the freedom to make a mockery or have bad sportsmanship or things like that,” Gasso said. “Don’t apologize for having passion for the game. Don’t apologize for feeling emotion and breaking down. Don’t apologize for anything that you’re saying on press row. If it’s passionate in your heart, then we don’t need to apologize for that."
Gasso has created an environment where these star players must bring their best, they must compete and strive to improve every day. When home run queen Alo first arrived on campus, she didn’t even get to practice for the first week-and-a-half because she failed the team’s strict fitness test.
“I was in Chub Club, which is basically where you just run around the stadium until practice is done because you're out of shape,” Alo remembered. “Once I passed the fitness test, I just laid out on the ground.”
Once she made her way onto the practice field with the rest of her teammates, she immediately took aim at the record books. With help from hitting coach, JT Gasso -- Patty’s son -- Alo honed her attack.
“Once I had gone to practice, I said, ‘I want to be the best. I want to break this home run record,’” Alo said.
It wasn’t just the record book she was competing against, though: It was also her teammates.
“That's what made us so good. Jossy would hit a home run, so I would try to top it,” Jennings said. “I would hit a home run, so she would try to hit two home runs, just going back and forth. But at the end of the day, we are competing with each other. It's not like we're trying to beat one another, but during the game, it's more like we’re trying to compete with each other, to make each other better and to make the team better.”
“We always say ‘iron sharpens iron,’” Pickering recalls of another Gasso phrase. “When your teammates are doing good, you celebrate them, but it also makes you want to be even more of a competitor to keep doing good. There's no jealousy at all. It's always like where you hit a home run, now I'm gonna hit a home run. You strive to be better.”
That push to be No. 1 now means the most talented players want to be in Oklahoma, to train alongside the very best. And if they can’t make it to Oklahoma? Then they want to beat the very best.
“We try to take it as like pressure as a privilege, and that we are going to get everyone's best,” Pickering said. "That just holds us to a higher standard, like we have to perform day in and day out.”
“I always loved that the target was on our back,” Hansen said. “There is something special about the underdog, but there's something even more special, in my opinion, about just dominating everyone over and over and over and over.”
Former Florida Gators standout and current AUSL star Amanda Lorenz -- who will be playing alongside Lorenzo Cain and Reese Atwood at HRDX this weeknd -- knows this well. She may have just played for coach Gasso at USA Softball’s gold medal run at the World Games in China, but remembers what it was like to go up against Oklahoma.
“I mean, everyone was out to beat Oklahoma,” Lorenz said.
Through a sheer force of will, of talent and drive and success, it is not just college softball but the world that will call OKC home. The 2028 Olympics may be going to Los Angeles, but softball is staying right at Devon Park. That’s right: When USA Softball takes the field under coach Gasso three summers from now, it will be in the place that knows nothing but Oklahoma softball victory.
“This plan is nothing about me,” Gasso said about the 2028 Olympics. “It’s about getting this team back into the gold-medal circle. We haven’t been there in a while and I’m not changing anything that we’ve done. I’m going to get these guys to believe in who they are and what they’re doing and what they’re representing and create a culture that’s rock solid.”
Jennings may coach alongside Gasso at Oklahoma these days, but she's more than thrilled to be playing for her once again while representing her nation.
“To be next to coach Gasso winning national championships is amazing,” Jennings said, “but to even dream about winning an Olympic gold medal with coach Gasso in OKC is even my bigger dream.”