Oklahoma softball: Is this year’s team the best Sooner squad all-time?
By Chip Rouse
The 2019 Sooners arguably are chasing the 2013 team for Sooner softball supremacy
Pending Oklahoma’s current run to a fifth national crown, the Sooner squad with perhaps the strongest claim to the best of the best in crimson and cream is the 2013 team.
In 2013, OU won 57 games and lost just four times in 61 games. Sooner pitcher Keilani Ricketts was National Player of the Year with a 27-1 record and a 1.10 earned run average, and Lauren Chamberlain, who is the NCAA record holder with 95 career home runs and a ..960 slugging percentage, led a potent Oklahoma offense.
The Sooners batted .335 as a team that season, The pitching staff, anchored by Ricketts, was equally impressive, posting a collective 1.16 ERA.
Ten of Oklahoma’s 57 wins in 2013 came during a perfect postseason. The Sooners outscored five opponents 32-8 in winning the Women’s College World Series.
The 2000 and 2016 Sooner teams boasted superlative resumes in their own right on the way to OU’s first and third national titles, but neither was as complete a team as this year’s group or the 2013 national championship team.
The 2000 team were trail blazers, reaching college softball’s highest rung for the first time in school history, and they did it with great grit, a closely knit team chemistry and a good but not great lineup. The 66 wins produced by this team are the most in a single season in program history. Their success was as much the result of resilience and a refuse-to-lose mentality as it was individual or collective talent, compared with the other great Sooner teams.
The 2016 national championship team had Paige Parker, and that was enough to win most every game in which she was in the circle. The First-Team All-American won a team-record 38 games that season, It helped, of course that she had a highly productive lineup behind her. Seven different Sooners hit .345 or better. The biggest limitation with this team was the lack of pitching depth behind Parker.