Three Sooner softball players leaving via transfer portal

The national champion Oklahoma softball program was already saying goodbye to 10 seniors. Add three more players to that total who have elected to enter the transfer portal.

As everyone knows, the transfer portal both giveth and taketh away. Oklahoma head coach Patty Gasso has taken the Sooners to an unprecedented four consecutive national championships, and her employment of the portal to supplement an already robust recruitment pipeline attracting top talent has been a big part of that success.

A prime example of players Oklahoma has acquired through the transfer portal who have contibuted mightily to the Sooners four-year championship run are pitchers Giselle Juarez, Hope Trautwein, Alex Storako and Kelly Maxwell. Also Alyssa Brito, Alynah Torres and Cydney Sanders from this year's national championship team. Juarez and Maxwell both were named Women's College World Series Most Outstanding Players in 2021 and 2024, respectively.

That's the plus side of the transfer portal debate. But there also is a downside, and the Oklahoma program caught the first and hopefully last wave of that this week. According to a social media post by staff writer Justin McLeod of D1Softball.com, three different players off the 2024 Sooner roster will be leaving the program via transfer.

The most notable of the announced departures is sophomore Avery Hodge, who filled in superbly at second base in the Women's College World Series for the injured Alynah Torres, who was struck in the face with a ball lost in the sun in OU's series win over UCLA. Also entering the portal are redshirt-freshman pitcher S.J. Geurin and redshirt-sophomore utility player Quincee Lilio.

Hodge is a career . 278 hitter in two seasons at OU and was 4 for 12 at the plate (.333) in WCWS games against Florida and Texas. She also made several nice plays in the field. Lilio played sparingly for the Sooners this season. She batted 31 times with a batting average of .129. Coming out of high school in Richmond, Texas, Lilio was ranked as a top-five overall prospect by Extra Inning softball.

This is an inherent problem of being able to recruit some of the best players in the country and having such a deep and talented roster virtually every year. These are all good players who may not have the opportunity to play as much as they would like to. At a program like OU, they might have to bide their time, while they could probably start somewhere else.

Hodge is a career . 278 hitter in two seasons at OU and was 4 for 12 at the plate (.333) in WCWS games against Florida and Texas. She also made several nice plays in the field.

Lilio played sparingly for the Sooners this season. She batted 31 times with a batting average of .129. She was used mostly in pinch-hit roles and has a career batting average of .211. Coming out of high school in Richmond, Texas, Lilio was ranked as a top-five overall prospect by Extra Inning softball.

Geurin pitched 10 innings for OU in the 2024 season and had a 0.70 earned run average.

Transfer departures is an inherent problem of being able to recruit some of the best players in the country and having such a deep and talented roster virtually every year. These are all good players who may not have the opportunity to play as much as they would like to. At a program like OU, they might have to bide their time, while they could probably start somewhere else.

Oklahoma has another outstanding recruiting class coming in, but with the high number of departures from the senior-heavy 2024 roster, you can expect Gasso to be especially active in the transfer portal again this offseason.