Oklahoma softball: Reminiscing on another specatacular Sooner season
By Chip Rouse
The David vs. Goliath WCWS championship series – one for the ages
As good as the Oklahoma pitching staff – one Patty Gasso acknowledged was the deepest one she has had in 23 seasons in Norman – was this season, Florida’s was even better. The Gators came into the 2017 WCWS with a staff ERA of well under 1.00.
Oklahoma was the best fielding team in the Big 12 (.977) and ranked as the sixth best in the country. Florida, however, was even stronger in that category, ranked No. 1 in the nation with a .985 fielding percentage.
Offensively, the Sooners were probably the stronger of the two teams, but they both averaged over five runs a game.
What statistical analysis does not measure, however, is what’s in the heart and the will to win. And that is a factor that may have been the deciding difference in the championship series.
All of that was on dramatic and epic display in the record-shattering Game 1 that went 17 innings before a winner was finally able to emerge. Oklahoma came away with 7-5 victory in a game Gasso described afterward as “one of the greatest games in College World Series history.”
I don’t think anyone will dispute that.
“It was a game of will, a game of team, a game of character,” she said. “We were running out of gas a little bit, but they just kept fighting. It was an emotional, emotional roller-coaster of a game, and one that I will never, ever, ever forget.”
Although both teams were physically and mentally drained from playing the equivalent of two and a half games over nearly six hours the night before, you couldn’t really tell it from the punching and counterpunching that took place in the opening couple of innings in Game 2 of the championship series.
The Sooners took a brief 1-0 lead on a lead-off home run by freshman Nicole Mendes. Florida matched that and added to it with a three-run top of the second, only to have the Sooners respond with four of their own – three coming on a bases-clearing double by WCWS Most Outstanding Player Shay Knighton – to take a 5-3 lead they would not relinquish the remainder of the game.
The championship is the Sooners third in the last five seasons and fourth overall, all under Patty Gasso. The last team not named Oklahoma or Florida to win a Women’s College World Series was Alabama in 2012, taking the championship series two games to one over…Oklahoma.
Florida was seeking its third national championship in four seasons. After falling just short of that goal in the 5-4 WCWS loss to Oklahoma, Florida junior Aleisha Ocasio, the starting pitcher for the Gators in Game 2, echoed the sentiment expressed by several of her teammates that anytime you end your season in Oklahoma City, it’s a great season.
“You know, we came up shorthanded,” Ocasio said to reporters after the game. “They (Oklahoma) played a great game. We had a hard fight both games, and we just didn’t come out on top.”
"“I still cannot believe that this happened,” said OU’s Gasso, alongside several of the key Sooner contributors, in the OU postgame press conference. “The journey was unbelievable. I think if you looked at us in February and March, even parts of April, you would never imagine us sitting here right not with trophies in front of us.”"
There is once again joy in Norman, Okla…the national championship trophy in softball remains there along with the newest dynasty in Division I college softball: the Oklahoma Sooners.