Oklahoma Softball Star Jocelyn Alo Originally Committed to Cal

Instead the two-time national player of the year leads the No. 1 Sooners into the NCAA championship series

What if Jocelyn Alo had come to Cal?

She is the two-time national player of the year and quite possibly the best hitter ever to play college softball. And she will try to lead No. 1 Oklahoma to its second straight national title when the Sooners begin the best-of-three NCAA championship series in Game 1 tonight (Wednesday June 8).

But we ask again: What if Jocelyn Alo had come to Cal?

It's not far-fetched, because she originally committed to Cal before changing her mind and attending Oklahoma.

BYU and Oregon offered her scholarships when she was a seventh-grader growing up in Hawaii. Then, as an eighth-grader, she committed to Cal.

It made sense.  There was a familiarity with the Bay Area, particularly the East Bay.  Her parents both attended Laney College, a junior college in Oakland, Calif., where her mother played softball and her father played football.  Jocelyn wears No. 78 at Oklahoma, an homage to her father, who wore No. 78 as a lineman at Laney.

Alo's grandparents lived in Berkeley, which was a launching point for Alo's annual trips to southern California for her softball camps.  A long story on Alo by ESPN's Tim Koewn pointed out the connection in this excerpt:

From the first time they journeyed to the mainland, where Levi's suspicions were confirmed by his daughter's performance at the BYU camp, the summers all played out the same way: Levi and Jocelyn would fly from Honolulu to Oakland, California, to pick up a spare Suburban from Andrea's parents in nearby Berkeley, load it with their summer collection of household items (pots, pans, shower curtain, plastic containers, microwave) and make the six-hour drive to Anaheim, California, where they rented a one-bedroom apartment next to the Sports Training Complex, a softball facility run by a nationally known travel-ball coach Mike Stith. And then it began: two months of mornings in the batting cage, afternoons at practice and/or speed and quickness classes, weekends at tournaments as far away as Florida.

Cal was a national softball power at the time of Alo's commitment.  The Golden Bears had won the softball national championship in 2003 and were the national runnersup each of the next two seasons. In 2013, when Alo was an eighth-grader, Cal began the season ranked No. 3 in the country and spent most of the season in the top 10.

By the time Alo was a junior in 2016, Cal was still a strong softball program that made it to the NCAA regionals, but it was unranked for much of the season and finished the year without a top-25 ranking.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma was becoming a national powerhouse.  The Sooners won their second national championship in four years in 2016 and won it again in 2017 when Alo was a high school senior. 

Whether the two programs' paths had anything to do with Alo's decision is unclear, but during her junior year of high school she decommitted from Cal and opened up her recruitment.

"I wasn't feeling Cal anymore," she says, according to the ESPN.com story.

“My heart just didn't want to be there anymore,” Alo said in a 2018 story in the Norman (Okla.) Transcript. “So I de-committed and asked around about what everyone had.”

Plus Alo's reputation as an outstanding hitter had grown. She hit .612 as a junior in 2016 and was named the Gatorade Hawaii high school player of the year. A June 2016 USA Today story about her winning that award still listed her as committed to Cal.

She wound up at Oklahoma and has put up amazing numbers. She has 120 career home runs, an NCAA record by a sizable margin, and this year she currently ranks first nationally in on-base percentage (.641), first in slugging percentage (1.189), first in OPS (1.830), second in batting average (.509), second in home runs (32) and second in RBIs (82).  

In the Sooners' nine postseason games this year, against the best teams in the country, she is hitting .654 (17-for-26) with seven homers and 20 RBIs.  In the 15-0 victory over UCLA that put the Sooners into the championship series against Texas, Alo went 4-for-4 with two homers and seven RBIs.

What if she had come to Cal?

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Cover photo of Jocelyn Alo is by Sarah Phipps, the Oklahoman, USA TODAY Network

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Follow Jake Curtis of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jakecurtis53

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