Oklahoma

• Eli LedermanMay 31, 2025, 08:00 AM ET

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  Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.

Editor’s note: This story was originally posted on May 28, 2025, before the 2025 WCWS. With Oklahoma moving on, we have updated it.

NORMAN, Okla. — Patty Gasso pulled Jocelyn Alo into her office and told college softball’s eventual career home run queen to go home.

It was early April 2019, and Gasso, then in her 25th season coaching Oklahoma, had watched her budding superstar struggle for months. After leading the nation with 30 home runs as a freshman in 2018, Alo spent the initial weeks of her sophomore season mired in a slump, toiling under the heightened expectations and attention that followed her debut campaign. Across her first 40 games that spring, Alo homered just seven times.

“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Alo said. “I felt it all fall and into the spring. I didn’t want to play softball. I didn’t enjoy showing up to practice. I lived with the pressure every single day.”

More than just a young hitter pressing in the batter’s box, Gasso saw Alo devolving into a frustrated presence capable of dragging the Sooners’ locker room down with her. So, Oklahoma’s coach handed Alo an enforced break before a three-game series at Kansas, barring her from practice, team workouts and the road trip.

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For seven days, Alo lived as a normal student. Watching her teammates roll to a series sweep from her couch, Alo suddenly felt the perspective she had been missing wash over her. Alo returned to hit 85 home runs over the next three-and-a-half seasons, closing her career in 2022 as a two-time national champion and Division I softball’s all-time home run leader.

“As hard as I fought Patty on it, that was a monumental moment that shaped me and kind of propelled me into my success,” she said. “Coach Gasso knows how to bring greatness out of every player — not just on the field but in every aspect of life. There’s simply not enough words to explain how special she is and how important she’s been to the world of women’s sports.”

Perhaps there aren’t enough words to sum up Gasso’s legacy, but numbers paint the picture of a college softball pioneer and the game’s best coaching résumé. Since arriving at Oklahoma in 1994, Gasso has produced 1,565 wins, 84 All-Americans, 17 Women’s College World Series appearances and 8 national championships, including four consecutive titles from 2021 to 2024.

Gasso, 63, is authoring her latest triumph this spring. The defending champion Sooners opened their latest WCWS trip with a dramatic win against Tennessee on Thursday and now face rival Texas on Saturday (3 p.m. ET on ABC/ESPN+). The Sooners are favored to claim an unprecedented fifth straight national title.

“To stay at the top of the game and continually win year in, year out is incredible,” said Andrea Martensen [Davis], a member of the Sooners’ 2000 national title team. “She’s just the greatest to ever do it.”

How did Gasso transform Oklahoma into the sport’s preeminent modern dynasty, vault the Sooners into conversations with UConn women’s basketball and Alabama football and rise into status as one of the greatest coaches of all time? ESPN spoke with over a dozen former players and softball figures to capture the defining eras and near-constant evolutions that turned Gasso into college softball’s reluctant GOAT.

“My whole life all I wanted to ever be was a coach and a teacher,” Gasso told ESPN. “I love working with young people, I love watching girls turn into women, but I don’t love when someone credits me because the players have always been the ones doing it.

“I think of it like a symphony: The conductor is up there waving his wand around a little bit, but it’s the people playing the instruments that are really creating the music. That’s how I think about it.”

1990-2000: A coaching rise and a dynasty that almost never was

Patty Gasso led the Oklahoma Sooners to the 2000 title. Oklahoma Athletics

Oklahoma upset perennial power UCLA in the 2000 title game. Less than a year earlier, the Sooners’ nascent dynasty was on the verge of crumbling before it ever took off.

Oklahoma won 71.8% of its games from 1995 to 1999 and reached the postseason in each of Gasso’s first five seasons, but the work of laying the foundation came at a cost. By the 1999 offseason, Gasso’s mind was essentially made up: She would coach the Sooners through the 2000 campaign, then resign and return to California.

“It was probably the hardest time of my life,” Gasso said. “I felt disconnected. I felt frustrated. I was running out of gas. … I really felt like I wasn’t being a very good mom or a very good coach.”

Five years earlier, Marita Hynes spent the early fall of 1994 on the patio of her Norman home making phone calls. A senior administrator and Oklahoma’s softball coach from 1977 to 1984, Hynes had been appointed to identify a replacement for Jim Beitia, who had left that September, months after leading the Sooners to the program’s first NCAA tournament appearance.

Searching for a candidate who could build on Oklahoma’s momentum, Hynes sought particular influence from leaders within college softball’s West Coast power base. Arizona’s Mike Candrea. Sharron Backus and Sue Enquist at UCLA. Cal State Fullerton’s Judi Garman. Each told Hynes about a young coach who was dominating California’s junior college scene.

Future USA Softball Hall of Famer Mickey Davis, an old friend and the athletic director of Long Beach City College at the time, implored Hynes to take a chance on Gasso, who was eight months pregnant with her second son, DJ, when she accepted the Oklahoma job.

“She came to visit the campus with her husband, Jim, and we were sat in my tiny office in the football stadium,” Hynes said. “They asked if they could go somewhere to talk it over privately. I didn’t know if Patty was going to take the job or not. A few minutes later, they busted back into the room with little ‘OU’ stickers on their cheeks. The rest is history.”

A California native who starred at El Camino Junior College and Long Beach State, Gasso rose through the local high school coaching ranks in the late 1980s. She was 27 when she took over Long Beach City College’s softball program prior to the 1990 season. Over five seasons with the Vikings, Gasso instilled blue-collar principles, exacting standards and compiled a 161-59-1 record, collecting four conference championships and two regional junior college titles.

Members of Gasso’s earliest LBCC teams grumbled through mandated 6-mile jogs each week, wondering when they’d ever have to cover such distance on the field. Only later did players like infielder Christine Benyak understand the purpose behind the early-morning runs.

“It wasn’t about physical fitness — Patty wanted us to have mental endurance,” Benyak said. “We were a team of nobodies, and she got every single ounce out of us that she could.”

Gasso brought three LBCC players, including Benyak, and the same ethos with her to Oklahoma prior to the 1995 season. The Sooners had a dress code on road trips, daily 5:30 a.m. workouts and a fierce coach dedicated to perfecting every single detail.

“She’d drop by our apartments and say, ‘Let’s see what’s in your fridge,'” Benyak recalled.

There were, however, reasons behind all of Gasso’s methods. Kisha Washington, a Sooners’ infielder from 1998 to 2001, remembers how infectious Gasso’s passion was. While Oklahoma collected a trio of Big 12 conference titles from 1996 to 1999, a collective spirit formed in the years leading up to the 2000 title.

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“The high standards she held for herself and everyone in her program — Patty changed our whole mindset,” Washington said. “She pulled stuff out of people that they didn’t even know they were capable of. By 2000, there was no stopping us.”

In the backdrop of the Sooners’ ascendence, Gasso was running on fumes.

The move to Oklahoma presented Gasso with a new challenge, but also a pay cut. “In the Midwest, women’s athletics was nowhere near where it is today in terms of investment,” said Gasso, who made less per year at Oklahoma than in her final season at LBCC.

After Jim returned to California in 1999 to lead Fullerton Junior College’s soccer program, Gasso found herself managing a Division I program on a slim salary and raising two sons alone, smothered by the juggling act.

“I couldn’t manage all of it,” Gasso said. “I was worrying about my kids when I should have been thinking about my job and vice versa, and the money wasn’t worth living life that way.”

Hynes saw the stress on Gasso’s face daily, but noticed an unbending resilience, too. On May 21, 2000, as the Sooners celebrated the regional win over Oregon State that clinched the program’s first WCWS appearance, Hynes made a beeline for Gasso.

“You’ve seen Patty smile a lot in the last four years, but she didn’t do a lot of that back then,” Hynes said. “I remember that day, she hugged me so hard and we just cried together.”

2001-2012: Building a winner through evolution

Patty Gasso embraced change in order to build the Sooners’ dynasty. Oklahoma Athletics

Oklahoma’s triumph at the 2000 WCWS kept Gasso in Norman with a healthy pay bump.

But as the Sooners chased that success, they often fell short over the ensuing decade. From 2001 to 2004, Oklahoma made four consecutive trips back to the WCWS without advancing past the second round. Super regional losses in 2005, ’07, ’08 and ’10 became dents during the program’s leanest run of Gasso’s tenure.

Seven years after the Sooners’ last WCWS appearance, the program returned but exited early in 2011, then fell to Alabama in the 2012 WCWS finals.

“There was just a different level of teams out there in those years,” said JT Gasso, who joined his mom’s staff as a graduate assistant in 2012. “We were always just missing a couple of those key pieces.”

Mississippi State head coach Samantha Ricketts never reached the WCWS as a player at Oklahoma from 2006 to 2009. Thinking back to the spring she joined Gasso’s staff after graduation, Ricketts recalled seeing the early embers of a transformation.

“I remember having a conversation with Patty after she made some personnel moves,” Ricketts said. “She knew she needed people who were going to buy into the vision of the program. But Patty also seemed to know that she needed to make some bigger changes to push us forward.”

While the core principles the Sooners used to build their first national title team have remained central, it’s been Gasso’s willingness to evolve that unlocked a dynasty.

“She’s the same age as some of these other legendary coaches. But while so many of them seemed to get left behind, she just got better,” said Northwestern pitching coach Michelle Gascoigne, who pitched for the Sooners from 2010 to 2013 and was an assistant under Gasso from 2014-15.

Gasso and her staff were quick to jump on the video tools and other scouting technologies that began creeping into softball in the late 2000s. She’s long been committed to exposing her players to the latest fitness trends, too. In the early 2010s, Gascoigne recalls the program introducing the Sooners to a game-changing new program: CrossFit. More recently, Gasso has embraced the transfer portal and welcomed name, image and likeness (NIL).

However, the single most transformative shift came in recruiting. By the mid-2000s, Gasso not only understood she needed the right people around her but that the Sooners wouldn’t contend consistently until they broke the West Coast powerhouses’ hold over the nation’s top recruits.

The blue bloods of the Pac-10 owned the three decades that followed the inaugural WCWS in 1982. UCLA emerged as the sport’s first dynasty and claimed six of the first nine national championships. Candrea and Arizona followed next with five titles in the 1990s.

Between 1982 and 2012, all but four national champions came from programs in Arizona, California or Washington. And the West Coast dominance reflected itself on the recruiting trail in the talent-rich pockets of Southern California, where the best players from elite travel teams funneled to the major college programs across the region, and seldom outside of it.

With her roots in Long Beach, Gasso remained tied in with the travel ball scene. But it was only after the Sooners lifted the 2000 trophy that Gasso was able to begin chipping away at Southern California’s talent pipeline in earnest and bolster Oklahoma’s credibility as an attractive landing spot.

Of the 16 players on the Sooners’ 2000 national title team, only three came from the West Coast. Over time, the scales of Oklahoma’s roster slanted further west. In 2013, Oklahoma rode a core of Californians — Gascoigne, Lauren Chamberlain, Destinee Martinez, Keilani Ricketts and Jessica Shults — to the program’s second national championship. From 2021 to 2024, nearly a third of the 47 players who suited up across the Sooners’ four-peat hailed from California.

“There’s a point in coaching where you have to sell people on your program. If you’re successful, the program sells itself and then you become a destination,” said Candrea, who retired in 2021 after 36 seasons at Arizona. “Patty’s gotten kids from Southern California that back in the day never would have left California. She turned Oklahoma into a destination.”

2013-2017: Gasso, IHOP aficionado and master motivator

The Sooners won their second national championship in 2013. Oklahoma Athletics

A few years ago, at a coaches convention in San Antonio, JT Gasso attended a dinner of former Sooners. Around a table of former players from every era of his mother’s career, he realized that each generation had experienced a distinct version of her.

“The players from the early 2000s talked about how grateful they were for how hard she was on them,” JT said. “The next generation of players appreciated having more of a connection with my mom. And now, I think she’s kind of blended the two ways of coaching our players.”

Gasso’s longevity atop the sport is rooted in part to her appetite for reinvention, continually reshaping her coaching style while maintaining unwavering principles. Members of Gasso’s earliest teams are often awed when they return to Norman to see their former coach cracking a smile in the coaching box and dancing with her players after wins.

Another habit that would have seemed foreign to earlier generations: the one-on-one breakfast/lunch meetings Gasso began holding with her players in the 2010s.

“The thing I probably changed the most is I started listening instead of talking,” Gasso said. “I realized that I needed to be more connected with them … they yearn for that. They want that.”

A particular fan of IHOP, Gasso uses the time to check in with her players away from softball, often centering the conversations on school, faith and family. Among her players, the meals have developed a deeper trust and connection with a coach who says she has “surrendered her ego” in recent years.

After a disjointed fall camp, Gasso met with each of her 20 players prior to the 2023 season. In May, they gave her an IHOP gift card to commemorate Gasso’s 61st birthday.

“We’re people to her, first and foremost,” two-time champion Shay Knighten said. “It’s why we were able to play the way we were able to play. …. She doesn’t want to change you. She just wants you to be better and grow.”

Stories of Gasso’s feel for knowing what her teams need in a given moment — and her creative toolbox of motivational tactics — are legend, too.

“She’s a master motivator,” said Gasso’s youngest son, DJ, an assistant coach at Arkansas. As a child, DJ watched his mother get ejected from a game, then helped her stage a faux locker room tantrum. “We basically decorated the locker room to make it look like she’d torn it up, tossing chairs and throwing stuff everywhere just so she could send a message to the team after.”

Interviews of Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan; films including “Gladiator” and “Secretariat”; covert ice cream under the noses of strict team nutritionists; Gasso has used them all over the years to catalyze her teams. She spent the early weeks of the 2019 season sprinkling anonymous Janet Jackson lyrics into her pregame speeches. Eventually, her players figured it out.

“For the rest of the year, Janet Jackson was the end all, be all,” former outfielder Nicole Mendes said. “If you wanted to say something, it had to be a Janet Jackson quote.”

Keilani Ricketts remembers the day Gasso dealt her players a needed dose of perspective weeks before the Sooners’ 2013 national title.

Oklahoma hosted Texas A&M for a super regional on May 24, 2013. Days earlier, an EF5 tornado had torn through Moore, Oklahoma, killing 26 people including 9-year-old Sydney Angle, whose family and youth softball team were invited to attend Game 1.

“The game ended up getting rained out and pushed to the next day,” Ricketts said. “But Patty said, ‘The kids are here, let loose and have some fun.’ She organized a bunch of relay races and I just remember sloshing around in the rain with these little 10-year-old girls who were so happy to be there.”

“Those were my last few weeks of college softball and it felt like there was so much on the line at that moment,” she continued. “Those races were a reminder of what matters and why we play.”

Weeks later, the 57-4 Sooners swept through the WCWS field before downing Tennessee in the finals and clinching the second title in program history. Back-to-back titles in 2016 and ’17 capped a run that cemented Oklahoma’s status as a national power.

2018-present: Managing from the mountaintop

Oklahoma softball coach Patty Gasso looks to lead the Sooners to a fifth straight title. Oklahoma Athletics

The peak years of Gasso’s reign at Oklahoma, which saw the Sooners tally a 232-15 record on the way to four consecutive championships from 2021 to 2024, coincided with a national boom in college softball’s popularity.

Veterans like Hynes and Candrea recall a simpler time when you could look up from the dugout and count the fans in the stands at the WCWS. Last June, the finals hosted a record crowd of 12,324 for Oklahoma’s title-clinching victory. Another 2.5 million viewers tuned in from home.

“The magnitude of everything in the sport has just exploded,” Alo said. “It was incredible to be a part of that. But it came with a lot more pressure to perform.”

Oklahoma’s four-peat stands as the most dominant stretch in the game’s history, but the expectations and heightened attention that surrounded the Sooners in those years weighed heavily. As storylines like Alo’s pursuit of the all-time home run record in the spring of 2022 and a record-setting, 71-game win streak that began a year later stoked the flames, Gasso felt the temperature rising around her program.

In the midst of the historic title run, she made insulating her players a chief priority.

“When it came to them playing, my attitude was to stay out of their way,” Gasso said. “I understood that group, where they were really, really going to be challenged was on the mental side because of the amount that was asked of them the past few years. They were exhausted.”

Managing a group fresh off back-to-back titles, Gasso took steps to protect her team and pushed the Sooners to look inward ahead of the 2023 season.

Weekly media obligations were cut down; daily routines recalibrated. The program even scaled back the presence of its official social media accounts. Yet, no opponent, outlet or online troll worked harder to test Oklahoma’s resolve at the height of the dynasty than Gasso, who dialed in on sharpening her team’s collective mentality.

“It was all about slowing things down,” three-time All-American Jayda Coleman said. “Some days, Coach Gasso had us doing visualization exercises in cold tubs. Other times, we would meditate in the outfield grass with our shoes and socks off and see how long we could just concentrate on one thing. She wanted us to lock in on all the smallest details.”

Oklahoma’s national title teams in 2023 and ’24 adopted a siege mentality. “We called it our bubble — 21 [players] versus everyone,” pitcher Alex Storako said. “It became about the process more than the results.” The Sooners posted a .937 winning percentage over those two seasons.

“That mentality allowed us to play free,” said Storako, a transfer from Michigan in 2023. “And when you get players playing free like that, you get the results that Coach Gasso got from us day in, day out and keep lifting trophies in June.”

While Gasso is loath to look toward the finish line — on both this spring or her coaching career — she has already cemented a legacy.

Some will measure it by her trophy case. Others, including Gasso herself, may point to the hundreds of lives her program has shaped. A torchbearer who raised the bar on investment into the sport, Gasso’s impact as the first softball coach to earn $1 million annually and a central driver behind the $48 million ballpark Oklahoma opened in 2024 ripples across the game.

“Everyone in the sport has a nicer stadium because of Patty, and I think establishing the credibility of Oklahoma softball is the hardest thing she’s accomplished here,” Hynes said. “But her desire for perfection is what she’ll be remembered for. That’s never stopped in 31 years.”

Oklahoma punched its ticket to Oklahoma City against Alabama in the super regionals, extending the nation’s longest active streak of consecutive WCWS appearances to nine.

The 13-2 win was a vintage Gasso-era victory. But with 14 new players on the roster in 2025, the road to this latest WCWS trip was hardly so straightforward. Gasso’s voice cracked as she spoke about the “scattered” roster she began molding in September.

Of her 18 super regional wins with the Sooners, few have been sweeter than this one.

“It’s been an incredible journey,” Gasso said. “The fact that we are wearing these [super regional champion] hats, I still can’t grasp how big this is. I didn’t expect this. … I think there’s some things that we can do at the World Series that are going to surprise some people.”

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