An Oklahoma Sooners spring sports season to be celebrated

This has been a banner spring sports season for multiple Oklahoma Sooner athletic programs and postseason NCAA Championship runs. The success generated by several Sooner sports teams has been one for the ages,

The Oklahoma softball team traversed a 62-game schedule virtually unbeatable. The Lady Sooners began the season as the preseason No. 1 and reigning national champions, and that exactly the way they ended it, defeating fellow Big 12 foe Texas 10-5 at USA Softball Hall of Fame Stadium in nearby Oklahoma City for their second straight national title.

It was the second time in the last six complete seasons that OU has won the national crown in back-to-back years. The Sooners’ 59-3 overall record is the third best winning percentage in college softball history.

Oklahoma won its first national championship in softball in 2000, the same year (although different academic year) that Bob Stoops and the Sooners delivered a national championship in football. Since 2000, OU has won six national championships in softball with five of them coming in the last nine years.

One astonishing fact underscores how dominant the Sooners were from wire to wire this season. OU outscored its opponents by an incredible 514 runs in the 2022 season (579-65). Only 10 teams had ever scored as many as 514 runs in a season entering the 2022 campaign.

In addition to the team reaching the highest pinnacle of the sport for the sixth time, a couple of Sooner players carted home some hardware of their own. Jocelyn Alo set an NCAA career record for home runs and for the second consecutive year was named National Player of the Year. She also was the Most Outstanding Player of the Women’s College World Series.

Meanwhile, Alo’s freshman teammate, pitcher Jordy Bahl, was voted National Freshman Player of the Year. And that’s not all. The Sooner softball coaching staff, which includes head coach Patty Gasso and assistants J.T. Gasso (Patty’s son) and Jennifer Rocha, was honored by the National Fast-Pitch Coaches Association as the college staff of the year.

Before the softball team wrapped up its season, however, a couple of other OU athletic teams made their presence known late into the NCAA postseason. The OU women’s tennis team forged a 32-3 season record that earned them the No. 2 ranking nationally. Two of those three losses were to Texas, the first coming in championship finals of the Big 12 Championship and the other in the finals of the NCAA Championship.

Coming off a 2021 season in which the Sooner men’s golf team finished as national runner-up to Pepperdine in the NCAA Men’s Golf Championship, there were high expectations for Oklahoma in 2022. The Sooners did not disappoint, posting a school record-tying seven team wins and entering the NCAA postseason as the consensus No. 1 team in the country

Led by super senior transfer Chris Gotterup, Oklahoma tied with Vanderbilt for first place in the 72-hole stroke-play portion of the NCAA Men’s Championship, earning the Sooners one of the eight spots in the NCAA Championship quarterfinals. After making it to the championship final a year ago, the OU run fell a little short this season, as the Sooner men were upset by No. 7 Arizona State 3-2 in their quarterfinal match.

Despite falling just short of its national championship goals, Oklahoma was still just one of eight schools that made it all the way to the quarterfinal round of the NCAA Championship, which is a major accomplishment in and of itself. In addition, head coach Ryan Hybl was honored as National Coach of the Year by the Golf Coaches of America.

There is still one Oklahoma spring athletic program still in action, and on Saturday, head coach Skip Johnson’s Sooner baseball team begins a best-of-three championship series with Ole Miss that will determine the 2022 NCAA baseball champion. The Sooners have combined both power and situational hitting with outstanding pitching and strong fielding to go 3-0 in the College World Series for the third time in program history. Each of the previous two times (1951 and 1994), OU went on to capture the national championship.

Win or lose in this year’s MCWS championship series in Omaha, the Sooners have put together one of the best second halves of the season in school history. On April 12, OU was just 18-12 overall and 4-5 in Big 12 action. Since then, the Sooners have gone 27-10 and now are on the verge of their third national championship.

Only Ole Miss stands in the way of Oklahoma establishing NCAA history. No major college program has ever won both the Women’s College World Series and the Men’s College World Series in the same season.

Any way you look at it, it’s been an outstanding spring season for Oklahoma athletic teams, with four of them advancing deep in NCAA postseason action.

Believe me, there are plenty of schools that would give practically anything to be in the position that the University of Oklahoma has found itself in athletically this spring. That’s something that definitely deserves a Boomer! …Sooner!