Gasso gives Sooners wake-up call
Defending national champion Oklahoma was not having a good practice this week — and then coach Patty Gasso delivered a message.
NORMAN — Patty Gasso was not happy with her softball team.
As the sky darkened Wednesday night and a few stray raindrops leaked from the clouds, The Oklahoma softball coach held court around the circle at Marita Hynes Field.
At that moment in time, No. 1 seed Oklahoma (had just one more day separating it from the start of the Big 12 softball tournament. But Big 12 regular season champions weren’t practicing like a group readying for a postseason run.
Instead, Gasso witnessed a squad that lacked effort and focus, prompting her lengthy post-practice discussion.
Gasso’s used to giving this speech, the one that chides her players for bringing in the stress of final exams onto the diamond. Softball is supposed to be their escape, and instead the Sooners walked through the gates to the field still burdened by outside stressors — and it showed.
“Everyone thinks that they get a bye or a mulligan because it’s finals week,” she said. “They’re tired, stressed and my message was, ‘This is life. Every kid in the Big 12 is going through the same thing you are right now, every softball player in the country.’
“In this program, there are no excuses. We cannot waste a second in preparation for what’s coming.”
And what’s coming is the gauntlet of postseason play, including a conference tournament for the first time in six years. And with OU sitting at No. 11 in the RPI, the Sooners desperately need a strong showing to vault into the top-eight for a chance to host the Super Regionals.
With so much at stake, Gasso didn’t think she’d have to give her speech to this group, the one that’s won 24 of its last 25 games after dropping four games in the first month of the season. This group knows how crucial it is to put together a strong Big 12 tournament.
“They’ve worked very hard to pick up the pieces that they left unsettled in February and March,” Gasso said. “They’ve been on an incredible run, much like what they did last year. I expected a little more pride and a little more tenacity in all of that than what we got today.”
Earlier in the day, OU picked up four of five All Big-12 individual honors, including Coach of the Year, Player of the Year, Pitcher of the Year and Freshman of the Year. But Gasso got so wrapped up preparing for the tournament and trying to shake her team’s finals funk that she didn’t recognize the honored players during the practice. But she caught Shay Knighten after wrapping up her interview and gave her Player of the Year a hug.
The individual awards are nice, they both said, but those honors pale in comparison to the opportunity of grabbing team-earned trophies in the Big 12 and NCAA tournaments.
“When it’s subjective and it’s voted on by humans, to me, what I will celebrate are championship trophies because those are things we’ve earned,” Gasso said.
And to earn those trophies, beginning with the conference tournament title, OU will have to lose the finals fog for its games against Texas (2 p.m.) and Texas Tech (7:30 p.m.) on Friday.
“We know that we have to shake it off,” Knighten said. “Today wasn’t a day that we could. But I think that we’re going to take that and learn from it and know that finals is a part of life.
“It’s just like anything else. So just go out and do what you have to do and when it comes to softball, you can’t let anything else get in the way. It’s just you and the diamond.”