The Hypnotizing Effect of Jocelyn Alo

The Oklahoma slugger—who was named SI’s 2022 Athlete of the Year, along with Aaron Judge—made her success feel automatic every time she stepped up to the plate.

To watch Jocelyn Alo at bat this year was to fall into a sort of magical thinking.

Maybe you knew the facts, everything that made her the best slugger in the history of college softball, with remarkable power on display in her fifth and final season at Oklahoma. Maybe you knew the statistics—numbers that seemed to push against the limits of possibility. Alo—was named SI’s 2022 Athlete of the Year, along with Aaron Judge—finished the 2022 season with a .515 batting average and .646 on-base percentage, and she set NCAA career records for home runs, total bases and slugging percentage. Maybe you knew the story, how much she and her family sacrificed for this when she was growing up in Hawaiʻi, propelled by an early understanding of how precious her talent might be. Maybe you knew none of the above. Maybe, instead, you simply found the feeling through diffusion, unable to resist how a stadium thrummed with raw, kinetic anticipation whenever she stepped into the box.

And then came the magical thinking. No matter how much or how little you knew about Jocelyn Alo, you watched her come up to the plate, and you suddenly believed. It was not just that her success as a hitter felt automatic. (Though it often did.) No, it was something more specific, more ambitious: It was that a home run felt inevitable.

Alo—who was named SI’s 2022 Athlete of the Year—made all of her record-breaking moments seem automatic this season :: Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated

Of course, no home run is inevitable, not even for a player with the title of home run queen. There is no such thing as a plate appearance that comes with a guarantee. It requires a deeply childlike sense of belief to think otherwise: Even a .515 batting average means a player is nearly as likely to make an out as she is to record a hit. There is no arguing with the facts here. And yet Alo made them seem irrelevant. Her own numbers were jaw-dropping, but she made the concept of relying on the numbers feel silly, almost beside the point. It felt impossible to expect anything other than a home run. Regardless of what you knew, Alo dug in at the plate, and she made you believe in something else.

No one was immune to this dynamic—not the crowd, the dugout, the opposition. Not even Alo’s coach, Patty Gasso, who is one of the winningest in the history of the game after three decades of experience. She built Oklahoma into a powerhouse. She has won championship after championship after championship. This means Gasso, perhaps more than anyone, should be inured to the experience of watching greatness at this level. But at the Women’s College World Series in June, she was asked whether she had to actively remind herself this was not really normal, if she had to prepare herself not to anticipate a home run every night from Alo.

“I do,” the veteran coach said with a sigh, almost as if she was a bit embarrassed to admit that she, too, struggled to adhere to logic around her star player. “When she comes up, I'm expecting her to hit a home run, probably like anybody else. It’s ridiculous that I’m thinking that way.”

Yet it didn’t feel ridiculous. It felt like the most natural belief in the world. And now that Alo has some distance from her historic season—from the home run title, from all the other records, from the national championship that topped the whole thing off—she has found her own way to describe this magical thinking.

“When I look back on everything,” Alo says now, “it’s just storybook.”

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Alo set the tone for her season right away: On the afternoon of Feb. 10, in the first inning of the first game of the year, she hit a grand slam. If there’s any sure way to set a standard where home runs feel inevitable, well, that’s probably it. And the next afternoon, as if to underscore the point, Alo homered again. A week later, Oklahoma played a doubleheader, and she homered two times in each game. If that had been at all difficult, Alo didn’t show it—she hit yet another home run the next day.

There had been almost no question entering the season that she would break the all-time home run record: She’d entered 2022 just seven homers shy of the career mark of 95 held by fellow Sooner icon Lauren Chamberlain. (Though Alo had the benefit of a fifth year of eligibility because her junior season was cut short by the pandemic, Chamberlain had publicly given her blessing to her pursuit of the record, and there was a general understanding that Alo very well could have accomplished it already if she’d had a full year in ’20.) But this impressive start to the season ratcheted up the pressure. It had taken Alo just 10 games to hit the seven homers required to tie Chamberlain. The record-breaking eighth, surely, could not be far behind.

Alo had already shown that her time between home runs could be measured in hours rather than days: Every plate appearance of hers was now appointment viewing. But Alo’s next homer did not come in her next game. Nor did it come in the game after, or the one after that, or the one after that. She began to feel like almost everyone was pitching around her: She would be walked 16 times in the next eight games. Yet there were chances to make contact, too, and Alo suddenly had plenty of time left to ruminate on them.

“It was a long time in between … and I’m an in-my-head person,” she says. “I like to be alone with my thoughts.”

That introspection has generally served her well: It’s a critical part of her pregame preparation and her approach to hitting as a whole. But she also knows how it can turn on her. The ability to dial in and shut out everything around her often feels like a blessing, but it has occasionally been a curse, too.

This was the case during her sophomore year, when she found herself crumpling under the pressure that followed her remarkable freshman season, when she had led the country in home runs. “I was on the verge of quitting,” Alo reflects on that time now. “I did not want to play at all.” Gasso noticed the burden on her young star. And she thought she knew how to fix it: Stop. Just stop everything. No softball for two weeks, meaning no practices, no film, no discussions. There were three games scheduled in that period, and in no uncertain terms, Gasso let Alo know that she would not play in any of them. The slugger was stunned. But she didn’t know what else to do. (If she already felt so close to quitting, she figured, maybe this was the right choice, anyway.) So she took the break.

“That woke her up,” Gasso said this year at the Women’s College World Series. “Her and I have had some tough moments together, but all of those moments and her trusting me has revolved around surrendering who she was to us, to help get her to where she is now.”

Alo felt better when Gasso told her to come back to the team. She no longer wanted to quit, at least, even if she did not feel completely back to her old self. And in the weeks that followed, she figured out the lesson she had needed to learn: The sport expected greatness from her, and beyond that, she expected greatness from herself. But she was not going to let the game be her pressure cooker.

There had been eight games and 19 days between home runs No. 95 and the record-breaking No. 96. But Alo would not go so long between home runs again :: Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated

Instead, “this is my playground,” Alo says. “This is where I get to shine. This is where I get to have fun.”

That attitude set the foundation for her to handle pressure for the rest of her career at Oklahoma. “I feel like I’ve grown into such a different person,” Alo says. She used those skills to cope with the uncertainty of a pandemic-shortened campaign in 2020, to deliver Oklahoma a championship in ’21, to enjoy such a torrid start to the season in ’22. But this space between home runs—the chasm between record-tying and record-breaking—was her biggest challenge yet.

She’d never faced pressure like this before. And she needed to make sure that she could keep the game her playground.

Alo wondered whether she would hit No. 96 at an upcoming tournament in Palm Springs, where she knew that Chamberlain, a native Californian, would be in attendance to watch her. She wondered whether she would hit it on her home campus, at Marita Hynes Field in Norman, Okla., where she had grown into herself as both a player and a person. And she hardly dared to think beyond that. Because she knew what came next: Ever since it had been scheduled, Alo had been eagerly awaiting a tournament in Hawaiʻi, where her family has been for generations. She grew up in a town called Hauʻula on the island of Oʻahu. It’s a place that means more to her than anywhere in the world. But to grow into the player she’d always wanted to become, she’d needed to spend time away from the island from a young age, traveling in search of bigger softball opportunities elsewhere. She’d played travel ball in Southern California. She’d gone to tournaments and camps as a teenager all over the country. But she’d never had a chance to play—to really competitively play—at home in front of all the people she loved in the place that made her.

And now she would do it under the weight of history.

Oklahoma’s games would be at the University of Hawaiʻi. But while on the island, they made sure to visit another diamond, too: Alo’s home field, literally, with the house she grew up in visible just beyond centerfield. (“If you kept going through right center,” she says, “you would end up in our front yard.”) This was where she’d hit for hours as a child, a dedication to the game fostered by her father, Levi. She could not possibly have come back to Hawaiʻi without coming to this field. And brought her teammates, too, for a youth softball clinic and meet-and-greet.

This was nothing unusual: The team was used to little girls seeing them all as superstars. (Such is the dynasty-cultivated power of Oklahoma softball back in Norman.) But the response here was unlike anything they had seen before. Every little girl was in awe of Alo, almost beside themselves with emotion, overcome just to be in her presence. And the feeling was mutual. “I was in their shoes before,” Alo said. “It was so surreal. … I never really had anyone to look up to growing up like that. I was just like, ‘I come from the same island you come from. We look the same. And I just want you to know that things like this can happen with hard work.’” The little girls were overwhelmed.

The Sooners had always known how much Alo’s home meant to her. Now they understood how much she meant to her home.

“When we were in Hawaiʻi and I saw Joce talking to the little girls … I just broke down crying,” Oklahoma center fielder Jayda Coleman said at the WCWS. “She knows her ‘why,’ and that’s why she has pushed way past anyone else.”

It suddenly felt impossible, they said, to imagine Alo hitting No. 96 anywhere other than Hawaiʻi. No matter how the opposition pitched to her, no matter if the walks kept piling up, it seemed like it simply had to come here. Alo felt it, too. And so in front of a crowd with “everyone I ever knew,” she unleashed the sort of fierce, perfectly calibrated swing that she’d honed with all those hours on the field in Hauʻula. There was no doubt when she made contact: This was history.

There had been eight games and 19 days between home runs No. 95 and No. 96. But she would not go so long between home runs again. (In fact, a week later, Alo homered in six consecutive games.) Now that she had passed 95, she would soon pass 100, 110, 120. She’d cultivate that sense of magical thinking: She’d make it all feel inevitable again. Alo became the first player in history with three college seasons of 30 or more home runs. And perhaps most remarkable of all, her teammates said, she found a way to do it without getting trapped under the pressure. She was at the center of more attention than maybe any player in the history of college softball. Yet she kept the game her playground.

“Watching her celebrate that moment in Hawaiʻi was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen,” Gasso said at the Women’s College World Series. “And then after that—just watching where she’s gone since then—it was just so freeing for her.”

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“One of the biggest things that I’ve learned from her is to just really just leave it all out there,” Oklahoma pitcher Bahl said at the WCWS :: Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated

There were more storybook moments to come for Alo. (Though none, of course, quite matched the fairy-tale quality of No. 96.) There was Senior Day, when she struck out twice against rival Oklahoma State, only to come back and hit a grand slam in her last plate appearance to deliver a victory. There was the Women’s College World Series, when she helped secure a second consecutive title for Oklahoma, setting the all-time tournament home run record along the way. There was the very last inning of the championship game, when Gasso sent her out to play left field, giving her a curtain call in front of an awe-struck, wildly appreciative crowd in Oklahoma City.

But Alo wants to be very clear: She has so much in front of her still. She worked so hard this spring not just to set these college records, but to lay the foundation for success beyond them, confident that she can get even better. She played last summer with the Smash It Sports Vipers of Women’s Pro Fastpitch, and next year, she will be the face of a new team in the league, the Oklahoma City Spark. The professional softball landscape is shifting and has not traditionally been stable. But Alo is heartened by the fact that it’s growing. This is why she has worked so hard: She wants the chance to lead it into its next chapter.

“One of the biggest things that I’ve learned from her is to just really just leave it all out there,” Oklahoma pitcher Jordy Bahl said at the WCWS. “You’re never going to regret putting in the extra work when you don’t want to. She’s one of the hardest workers, and, for her, it’s all paid off.”

Alo wants to set WPF records for home runs, too, and she wants to become a more skilled defender. But for now, with the benefit of some time and distance, Alo can look back on her final college season and allow herself to feel pride—not so much for how she played, exactly, but for how she kept herself centered in the process. It’s not that she made success look inevitable so much as it is that she did so even when it felt impossible.

“She left it on that field,” Gasso said after Alo’s final game. “And she left it in the history books forever.”