Editor's note: The followingarticle was published first on d1softball.com.
Inevitability is one of many things Oklahoma has seemingly mastered on a softball field.
As a new season begins, there is Oklahoma … and there is everyone else. The Sooners are as overwhelming as any team in college sports at the moment. They are three-time defending champions, seeking to become the first team in NCAA Division I history to win four in a row. They have a 176-8 record over those three most recent seasons. They led the nation in scoring each time, as well as in ERA the past two seasons.
In 2021, as an example, they scored 211 more runs than any other team. That meant the gap between the best offense and second-best offense was equal to the gap between second and 90th.
All of this is the culmination of more than a decade in ascendancy, a span in which they’ve won six of the 10 national championships contested. With a lineup full of All-Americans, former nemesis Kelly Maxwell in the circle and a new stadium about to open its doors, Oklahoma feels, well, inevitable.
It may be. It wasn’t always. Nor was the rise that left it to rule over the sport.
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Less than two decades ago, Oklahoma was a good program, a nationally relevant program. But just one of perhaps a dozen such programs. In fact, as recently as 15 years ago, you could have argued that Oklahoma’s signature role in softball history had already come and gone. By winning the national championship in 2000, five years after Patty Gasso arrived in Norman, the Sooners ended a stretch of 11 titles in 12 years for either Arizona or UCLA and effectively launched the modern era.
Yet it wasn’t the Sooners who initially appeared as the beneficiaries of the softball land rush. Soon, Michigan won an even more historically significant title — the first champion from east of the Mississippi River and the first to go through a super regional and best-of-three title series. For much of the new millennium’s first decade, as Arizona State and Washington won titles and Alabama, Florida and Tennessee lifted the SEC, other programs rose to challenge Arizona and UCLA’s dominance.
As the best-of-three championship series took hold, television ratings soared and attendance records fell almost every year in the WCWS, Oklahoma didn’t make the trip up Interstate 35 for six consecutive seasons. Texas and Baylor made it in the span. Missouri made it twice in its Big 12 days. Texas A&M played for a title in that span. Oklahoma remained absent. A very good program. One of many.
So, how did we get from there to here? Like any dynasty, from the Merovingians to UConn women’s basketball, success is a story of people, circ*mstances and fortune. The right people were in the right places and caught the right breaks to make good on their aspirations.
As the 2024 Sooners try to make new history, and the rest of the country tries to find some way to stop what feels so inevitable, here are 10 inflection points that help explain the era.
Keilani Ricketts arrives (2010)
If you get right down to it, the current Oklahoma dynasty sprang to life two decades ago when Patty Gasso signed Samantha Ricketts. Yes, that Ricketts, the current Mississippi State head coach. Because when Gasso eventually signed her, she was still Samantha’s younger sister. Don’t take my word for it — it’s the first bit of identifying info in her 2008 signing release.
The elder Ricketts’ All-American experience in Norman was a big reason why the Sooners landed one of the most prized recruits in the country. And the two-time USA Softball Player of the Year, in turn, is a big reason why the college softball world looks the way it does now. Once Kami Keiter left the scene in 2004, following OU’s fifth consecutive World Series appearance, Oklahoma found itself where no elite program wants to be: searching for an ace. Pitchers had good seasons in that span, but in an era when an ace could still carry a team on her back, the Sooners never had the pitcher teams feared in May.
By 2009, the year before Ricketts arrived, Oklahoma ranked 81st in the nation in ERA. And North Dakota State walked out of Norman with a regional title.
Ricketts changed all of that. When she was a freshman, only three pitchers in the Power Five had a better ERA. Only four struck out more batters. It didn’t hurt that Jessica Shults and Michelle Gascoigne joined her in a Hall of Fame recruiting class. But even before she mastered the “crop duster” or grew completely comfortable as the center of attention, she was that pitcher. And when you have that pitcher, you’re back playing for the big stakes at the championship table.
A symbolic Super Regional (2011)
The Sooners nearly got back to Oklahoma City when Ricketts was a freshman, winning a 2010 super regional opener at Washington before Danielle Lawrie used every bit of her experience to fend off the upset (the second time that year that Lawrie singlehandedly delayed the start of an era). In 2011, Oklahoma again had to go on the road against a Pac-12 opponent in a super regional, this time visiting Arizona. The Wildcats were a No. 8 seed, but they were a year removed from playing for the national title — and only four years removed from the second of back-to-back titles that ran their overall total to eight.
Mike Candrea’s program was softball royalty. Oklahoma was a decade removed from its only title.
But for the first and only time in the super regional era, Oklahoma took the scenic route to Oklahoma City. Nor was Tucson just any destination. In 2005, the first year of the best-of-three round, Oklahoma’s bid for a sixth consecutive WCWS ended in an Arizona sweep. In 2008, the same story played out in the desert, the Wildcats eliminating the Sooners in three.
So despite a pair of regular season wins against Arizona in 2011, Oklahoma had history working against it in the super regional. Which proved to matter less than having Ricketts working for it — she gave herself a two-run lead with a first-inning home run in the finale and took it from there.
By 2012, it was Arizona that had to travel to Norman for a super regional, the Wildcats were little more than a speed bump as the Sooners finally returned to the World Series. Slowly, the tides shifted
Lauren Chamberlain lands (2012)
Numbers matter. And heaven knows there are plenty of numbers with which to measure Oklahoma’s dominance these many years. Dynasties are built on talent and numbers matter more than narrative when it comes to assessing talent. But life isn’t just dull without intangibles, it’s incomplete. People and personalities meet moments of time that are made for them.
Lauren Chamberlain was all of it when she arrived in the 2012 season. She was tangible with hitting skill that rewrote the NCAA record book in black and white digits. But she was also technicolor, a personality who turned the game into a stage. How could Oklahoma possibly dream bigger than Keilani Ricketts? By turning to someone who thought she could fly, judging by her iconic home run celebration.
Lauren Haeger, Hallie Wilson, Emilee Koerner, Chelsea Goodacre. Any of those players in Chamberlain’s class could have been All-Americans at Oklahoma, as they were elsewhere. They would have left beloved. They almost surely would have won a title, as Haeger indeed did twice over at Florida. But Gasso didn’t just get the best slugging percentage or weighted on-base average when she signed Chamberlain. She got the best person for the particular challenge of cementing Oklahoma’s status.
In 2013, with Chamberlain still nominally the understudy to Ricketts, Oklahoma’s dominance was a softball story. The Sooners led the nation in batting average, slugging percentage and ERA. But by 2015, as Chamberlain approached Stacey Nuveman's longstanding NCAA career home run record, the Sooners were a national story. A viral phenomenon. Their star thrived in the role, a template for all who followed.
Pitching interregnum (2014-15)
Spare a thought for Kelsey Stevens, destined to be the Sooner that history forgets — or at least overlooks. The first of Oklahoma’s transfer aces, years before the portal, Stevens had the unenviable task of following Ricketts and Michelle Gascoigne. But in 2014, there wasn't much she couldn’t shoulder.
Without Ricketts, Gascoigne and Shults, and with Chamberlain ailing for much of the season, Stevens threw nearly 70 percent of OU’s innings. She started 51 games including all three in a super regional against Tennessee. The team’s success was hardly hers alone (see: Pendley, Shelby and an offense that ranked third nationally in runs per game). But she pitched the Sooners back to the World Series, quelling any suggestion that another spell of fallow years would follow after Ricketts.
That effort appeared to take its toll on Stevens’ body in subsequent seasons, but it was the bridge to Paige Parker. After four years in which Ricketts went 125-35 with a 1.23 ERA and reached the World Series three times, Parker arrived in 2015 and went 123-18 with a 1.41 ERA and reached the World Series three times in her four seasons. That’s the sort of succession plan that so many other would-be powers failed to find this century, falling back into the pack of contenders after winning or playing for a title. With an assist from Stevens, the Sooners built this era on nearly a decade of uninterrupted aces.
Trusting the family business (2016)
When longtime hitting coach Tripp MacKay stepped down following the 2015 season, Gasso knew she was taking a risk with his replacement. Not because she doubted his ability to do the job. She knew all about his almost photographic memory for every hitter who ever played for the Sooners and relentless desire to learn. It was a risk because of the name that she and JT Gasso, her eldest son, shared.
Complicating matters was that JT wasn’t just taking over any job. After short stints at Purdue and Michigan State, he took over an offense that led the nation in scoring and slugging the year before. And he didn’t have Chamberlain or Pendley to try and replicate that production.
How did it work out?
In 2015, under MacKay, Oklahoma averaged 8.4 runs per game and slugged .657.
In 2023, they averaged 8.1 runs and slugged .666 — and those were by far the team’s most modest numbers during its current run of three straight titles.
In his six seasons played to completion, JT’s lineups produced four of the most prolific offensive seasons in Division I history.
They are responsible for three of the 12 best run-scoring seasons in Division I history. They own half of the top six single-season slugging percentages. They set the single-season record with 161 home runs in 2021. They almost broke the record in 2022.
Dynasties often falter when they become risk-averse. It’s easier to be bold when there’s little to lose. Oklahoma’s coach took a risk, in the process getting an up-and-coming hitting mind who keeps her offense on the cutting edge — and someone whose loyalty is never in question.
“One thing that I don’t know a lot of people know about JT is that he is a learner and wants to know more and go to heights that other coaches don’t go to,” Gasso said. “He’s very creative, very intelligent. He wants to learn new ways, different ways. I knew I was going to be judged, but I also knew enough about him that I had confidence he could do it.”
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