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Editor’s notice: This tale used to be at first posted on May 28, 2025, prior to the 2025 WCWS. With Oklahoma shifting on, we’ve up to date it.
NORMAN, Okla. — Patty Gasso pulled Jocelyn Alo into her place of work and informed faculty softball’s eventual profession house run queen to move house.
It used to be early April 2019, and Gasso, then in her 25th season training Oklahoma, had watched her budding celebrity fight for months. After main the country with 30 house runs as a freshman in 2018, Alo spent the preliminary weeks of her sophomore season mired in a stoop, toiling below the heightened expectancies and a spotlight that adopted her debut marketing campaign. Across her first 40 video games that spring, Alo homered simply seven occasions.
“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Alo mentioned. “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 only a younger hitter urgent within the batter’s field, Gasso noticed Alo devolving right into a pissed off presence in a position to dragging the Sooners’ locker room down along with her. So, Oklahoma’s trainer passed Alo an enforced wreck prior to a three-game sequence at Kansas, barring her from follow, crew workout routines and the street shuttle.
For seven days, Alo lived as a standard pupil. Watching her teammates roll to a chain sweep from her sofa, Alo unexpectedly felt the standpoint she have been lacking wash over her. Alo returned to hit 85 house runs over the following three-and-a-half seasons, final her profession in 2022 as a two-time nationwide champion and Division I softball’s all-time house run chief.
“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 mentioned. “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 don’t seem to be sufficient phrases to sum up Gasso’s legacy, however numbers paint the image of a school softball pioneer and the sport’s absolute best training 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 nationwide championships, together with 4 consecutive titles from 2021 to 2024.
Gasso, 63, is authoring her newest triumph this spring. The protecting champion Sooners opened their newest WCWS shuttle with a dramatic win in opposition to Tennessee on Thursday and now face rival Texas on Saturday (3 p.m. ET on ABC/ESPN+). The Sooners are appreciated to say an unheard of 5th instantly nationwide identify.
“To stay at the top of the game and continually win year in, year out is incredible,” mentioned Andrea Martensen [Davis], a member of the Sooners’ 2000 nationwide identify crew. “She’s just the greatest to ever do it.”
How did Gasso become Oklahoma into the game’s preeminent trendy dynasty, vault the Sooners into conversations with UConn girls’s basketball and Alabama soccer and upward push into standing as one of the most biggest coaches of all time? ESPN spoke with over a dozen former gamers and softball figures to seize the defining eras and near-constant evolutions that grew to become Gasso into faculty softball’s reluctant GOAT.
“My whole life all I wanted to ever be was a coach and a teacher,” Gasso informed 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 call to mind it like a symphony: The conductor is up there waving his wand round a bit of bit, however it is the folks taking part in the tools which might be truly developing the tune. That’s how I take into consideration it.”
1990-2000: A coaching rise and a dynasty that almost never was
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 used to be almost definitely the toughest time of my existence,” Gasso said. “I felt disconnected. I felt pissed off. I used to be working out of fuel. … I truly felt like I wasn’t being an excellent mother or an excellent trainer.”
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 around the campus along with her husband, Jim, and we had been sat in my tiny place of work within the soccer stadium,” Hynes said. “They requested if they may pass someplace to speak it over privately. I did not know if Patty used to be going to take the task or now not. A couple of mins later, they busted again into the room with little ‘OU’ stickers on their cheeks. The leisure is historical past.”
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 bodily health — Patty sought after us to have psychological staying power,” Benyak said. “We had been a crew of nobodies, and he or she were given each and every unmarried ounce out people that she may.”
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 way of our residences and say, ‘Let’s see what is for your refrigerator,'” 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.
“The high standards she held for herself and everyone in her program — Patty changed our whole mindset,” Washington mentioned. “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 used to be working on fumes.
The transfer to Oklahoma offered Gasso with a brand new problem, but additionally a pay lower. “In the Midwest, women’s athletics was nowhere near where it is today in terms of investment,” mentioned Gasso, who made much less in keeping with 12 months at Oklahoma than in her ultimate season at LBCC.
After Jim returned to California in 1999 to guide Fullerton Junior College’s football program, Gasso discovered herself managing a Division I program on a narrow wage and elevating two sons on my own, smothered by way of the juggling act.
“I couldn’t manage all of it,” Gasso mentioned. “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 noticed the tension on Gasso’s face day-to-day, however spotted an unbending resilience, too. On May 21, 2000, because the Sooners celebrated the regional win over Oregon State that clinched this system’s first WCWS look, 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 mentioned. “I remember that day, she hugged me so hard and we just cried together.”
2001-2012: Building a winner thru evolution
Oklahoma’s triumph on the 2000 WCWS saved Gasso in Norman with a wholesome pay bump.
But because the Sooners chased that good fortune, they continuously fell quick over the following decade. From 2001 to 2004, Oklahoma made 4 consecutive journeys again to the WCWS with out advancing previous the second one spherical. Super regional losses in 2005, ’07, ’08 and ’10 was dents all through this system’s leanest run of Gasso’s tenure.
Seven years after the Sooners’ remaining WCWS look, this system returned however exited early in 2011, then fell to Alabama within the 2012 WCWS finals.
“There was just a different level of teams out there in those years,” mentioned JT Gasso, who joined his mother’s team of workers as a graduate assistant in 2012. “We were always just missing a couple of those key pieces.”
Mississippi State head trainer Samantha Ricketts by no means reached the WCWS as a participant at Oklahoma from 2006 to 2009. Thinking again to the spring she joined Gasso’s team of workers after commencement, Ricketts recalled seeing the early embers of a metamorphosis.
“I remember having a conversation with Patty after she made some personnel moves,” Ricketts mentioned. “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 rules the Sooners used to construct their first nationwide identify crew have remained central, it is been Gasso’s willingness to conform 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,” mentioned Northwestern pitching trainer Michelle Gascoigne, who pitched for the Sooners from 2010 to 2013 and used to be an assistant below Gasso from 2014-15.
Gasso and her team of workers had been fast to leap at the video gear and different scouting applied sciences that started creeping into softball within the past due 2000s. She’s lengthy been dedicated to exposing her gamers to the most recent health developments, too. In the early 2010s, Gascoigne remembers this system introducing the Sooners to a game-changing new program: CrossFit. More lately, Gasso has embraced the switch portal and welcomed identify, symbol and likeness (NIL).
However, the only maximum transformative shift got here in recruiting. By the mid-2000s, Gasso now not handiest understood she wanted the fitting folks round her however that the Sooners would not contend persistently till they broke the West Coast powerhouses’ cling over the country’s most sensible recruits.
The blue bloods of the Pac-10 owned the 3 many years that adopted the inaugural WCWS in 1982. UCLA emerged as the game’s first dynasty and claimed six of the primary 9 nationwide championships. Candrea and Arizona adopted subsequent with 5 titles within the 1990s.
Between 1982 and 2012, all however 4 nationwide champions got here from techniques in Arizona, California or Washington. And the West Coast dominance mirrored itself at the recruiting path within the talent-rich wallet of Southern California, the place the most efficient gamers from elite commute groups funneled to the foremost faculty techniques around the area, and infrequently out of doors of it.
With her roots in Long Beach, Gasso remained tied in with the commute ball scene. But it used to be handiest after the Sooners lifted the 2000 trophy that Gasso used to be ready to start out chipping away at Southern California’s skillability pipeline in earnest and bolster Oklahoma’s credibility as an exquisite touchdown spot.
Of the 16 gamers at the Sooners’ 2000 nationwide identify crew, handiest 3 got here from the West Coast. Over time, the scales of Oklahoma’s roster slanted additional west. In 2013, Oklahoma rode a core of Californians — Gascoigne, Lauren Chamberlain, Destinee Martinez, Keilani Ricketts and Jessica Shults — to this system’s 2d nationwide championship. From 2021 to 2024, just about a 3rd of the 47 gamers who suited up around 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,” mentioned 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 grasp motivator
A couple of years in the past, at a coaches conference in San Antonio, JT Gasso attended a dinner of former Sooners. Around a desk of former gamers from each and every period of his mom’s profession, he learned that each and every technology had skilled a definite model of her.
“The players from the early 2000s talked about how grateful they were for how hard she was on them,” JT mentioned. “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 game is rooted partially to her urge for food for reinvention, regularly reshaping her training taste whilst keeping up unwavering rules. Members of Gasso’s earliest groups are continuously awed after they go back to Norman to look their former trainer cracking a grin within the training field and dancing along with her gamers after wins.
Another addiction that might have appeared overseas to previous generations: the one-on-one breakfast/lunch conferences Gasso started preserving along with her gamers within the 2010s.
“The thing I probably changed the most is I started listening instead of talking,” Gasso mentioned. “I realized that I needed to be more connected with them … they yearn for that. They want that.”
A selected fan of IHOP, Gasso makes use of the time to test in along with her gamers clear of softball, continuously centering the conversations on college, religion and circle of relatives. Among her gamers, the foods have evolved a deeper agree with and reference to a trainer who says she has “surrendered her ego” lately.
After a disjointed fall camp, Gasso met with each and every of her 20 gamers previous to the 2023 season. In May, they gave her an IHOP present card to commemorate Gasso’s 61st birthday.
“We’re people to her, first and foremost,” two-time champion Shay Knighten mentioned. “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 really feel for understanding what her groups want in a given second — and her inventive toolbox of motivational techniques — are legend, too.
“She’s a master motivator,” mentioned Gasso’s youngest son, DJ, an assistant trainer at Arkansas. As a kid, DJ watched his mom get ejected from a recreation, then helped her degree a fake 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; movies together with “Gladiator” and “Secretariat”; covert ice cream below the noses of strict crew nutritionists; Gasso has used them in every single place the years to catalyze her groups. She spent the early weeks of the 2019 season sprinkling nameless Janet Jackson lyrics into her pregame speeches. Eventually, her gamers figured it out.
“For the rest of the year, Janet Jackson was the end all, be all,” former outfielder Nicole Mendes mentioned. “If you wanted to say something, it had to be a Janet Jackson quote.”
Keilani Ricketts recalls the day Gasso dealt her gamers a wanted dose of standpoint weeks prior to the Sooners’ 2013 nationwide identify.
Oklahoma hosted Texas A&M for a perfect regional on May 24, 2013. Days previous, an EF5 twister had torn thru Moore, Oklahoma, killing 26 folks together with 9-year-old Sydney Angle, whose circle of relatives and early life softball crew had been invited to wait Game 1.
“The game ended up getting rained out and pushed to the next day,” Ricketts mentioned. “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 persisted. “Those races were a reminder of what matters and why we play.”
Weeks later, the 57-4 Sooners swept throughout the WCWS box prior to downing Tennessee within the finals and clinching the second one identify in program historical past. Back-to-back titles in 2016 and ’17 capped a run that cemented Oklahoma’s standing as a countrywide energy.
2018-present: Managing from the mountaintop
The top years of Gasso’s reign at Oklahoma, which noticed the Sooners tally a 232-15 listing on the best way to 4 consecutive championships from 2021 to 2024, coincided with a countrywide increase in faculty softball’s reputation.
Veterans like Hynes and Candrea recall a more practical time when you should glance up from the dugout and depend the enthusiasts within the stands on the WCWS. Last June, the finals hosted a listing crowd of 12,324 for Oklahoma’s title-clinching victory. Another 2.5 million audience tuned in from house.
“The magnitude of everything in the sport has just exploded,” Alo mentioned. “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 essentially the most dominant stretch within the recreation’s historical past, however the expectancies and heightened consideration that surrounded the Sooners in the ones years weighed closely. As storylines like Alo’s pursuit of the best-ever house run listing within the spring of 2022 and a record-setting, 71-game win streak that started a 12 months later stoked the flames, Gasso felt the temperature emerging round her program.
In the midst of the ancient identify run, she made insulating her gamers a main precedence.
“When it came to them playing, my attitude was to stay out of their way,” Gasso mentioned. “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 bunch recent off back-to-back titles, Gasso took steps to give protection to her crew and driven the Sooners to seem inward forward of the 2023 season.
Weekly media responsibilities had been lower down; day-to-day routines recalibrated. The program even scaled again the presence of its reputable social media accounts. Yet, no opponent, outlet or on-line troll labored more difficult to check Oklahoma’s unravel on the top of the dynasty than Gasso, who dialed in on polishing her crew’s collective mentality.
“It was all about slowing things down,” three-time All-American Jayda Coleman mentioned. “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 nationwide identify groups in 2023 and ’24 followed a siege mentality. “We called it our bubble — 21 [players] versus everyone,” pitcher Alex Storako mentioned. “It became about the process more than the results.” The Sooners posted a .937 successful share over the ones two seasons.
“That mentality allowed us to play free,” mentioned Storako, a switch 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 seem towards the end line — on each this spring or her training profession — she has already cemented a legacy.
Some will measure it by way of her trophy case. Others, together with Gasso herself, might level to the loads of lives her program has formed. A torchbearer who raised the bar on funding into the game, Gasso’s affect as the primary softball trainer to earn $1 million yearly and a central driving force in the back of the $48 million ballpark Oklahoma opened in 2024 ripples around the recreation.
“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 mentioned. “But her desire for perfection is what she’ll be remembered for. That’s never stopped in 31 years.”
Oklahoma punched its price tag to Oklahoma City in opposition to Alabama within the tremendous regionals, extending the country’s longest lively streak of consecutive WCWS appearances to 9.
The 13-2 win used to be a antique Gasso-era victory. But with 14 new gamers at the roster in 2025, the street to this newest WCWS shuttle used to be hardly ever so easy. Gasso’s voice cracked as she spoke concerning the “scattered” roster she started molding in September.
Of her 18 tremendous regional wins with the Sooners, few were sweeter than this one.
“It’s been an incredible journey,” Gasso mentioned. “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.”
