With two outs in the top of the ninth inning Monday, the score tied at 2 and a runner on third base, the Stanford softball team faced the kind of dilemma that typically haunts Oklahoma’s opponents. Jayda Coleman was coming to bat for the Sooners, and common sense suggested intentionally walking a player who already had homered. But behind her in the order waited Tiare Jennings. Both are juniors, and both have been named a first-team all-American in each of their three seasons in Norman.
Cardinal pitcher NiJaree Canady had struck out Jennings twice, which helped Stanford Coach Jessica Allister with her decision to walk Coleman and take her chances with Jennings. And, like so many difficult choices that Oklahoma’s opponents are forced to make to combat the Sooners’ unrelenting talent, it didn’t work.
Jennings’s double to the right-center gap scored Grace Lyons from third and Coleman from first, providing the Sooners with the winning runs in the 4-2 victory that sent them to the Women’s College World Series championship series for the fourth straight time. Oklahoma will face Florida State in a best-of-three series that starts Wednesday, a rematch of the 2021 final. With a victory, the Sooners will become just the second team in NCAA history to win three straight NCAA softball titles. (UCLA accomplished the feat in 1988, 1989 and 1990.)
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“We win a lot, and that’s fabulous,” Coach Patty Gasso said after the game. “But sometimes I think we’re so used to taking it for granted. This means a lot. To get to the championship game means a lot.”
The numbers illustrating the Sooners’ success are simply staggering. Oklahoma is 59-1 this season and has won an NCAA-record 51 straight games, its lone defeat coming by one run at Baylor on Feb. 19. Since the start of the 2021 season, the Sooners have lost eight times. Five of their players — Coleman, Jennings, third baseman Alyssa Brito, catcher Kinzie Hansen and pitcher Jordy Bahl — earned first-team all-American honors, the most of any team, and Lyons earned the Gold Glove Award for shortstops. The two runs Stanford scored in the first inning Monday, on Kylie Chung’s homer, are the only runs Oklahoma has surrendered in three Women’s College World Series games. The Sooners defeated Hofstra, Missouri and California by a combined score of 38-3 in three NCAA tournament regional games, with all three games shortened by the NCAA’s mercy rule that ends things if a team is up by eight or more runs after five or more innings.
This season, 28 Oklahoma games have ended before seven innings were played. Last season, 41 of 62 were. The program hasn’t lost a Big 12 series since 2011.
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“They are an exceptional team. We knew that coming in,” Tennessee Coach Karen Weekly said after Oklahoma’s 9-0, mercy-rule win over her Lady Vols on Saturday. “We knew that we had to play a pretty near flawless game in every phase of the game to have a chance at a victory. We didn’t do that, and you saw what happened.”
Weekly’s team managed all of one hit, and no player reached third base. It was Oklahoma’s program-record 34th shutout.
Gasso has led the Sooners to six national titles over her 28-plus seasons and now might have a team that’s better than any of them. In a recent appearance on the Oklahoma Breakdown podcast, she credited an embrace of analytics along with a more personal touch for her continued success.
“As I get older and players get younger, I started to feel a little bit distant. It’s important for me to continue to have relationships with players, so I did something the last couple years a little bit new where I would just take each one out individually for a lunch or a breakfast and just let them get to know me, ask me questions, I would ask them questions,” said Gasso, 61. “Nothing to do with softball.”
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Whatever it is, Gasso’s methods have worked. Oklahoma has won five of the past nine national titles and can make it 6 of 10 with two more wins — an astonishing level of success in big-time college athletics.
“You look at the people in their lineup,” Weekly said. “Great player after great player. Everybody in there has won a lot of awards, whether it’s been at Oklahoma or somewhere else before they got here. …
“There’s no break there.”
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