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OU Softball: How Oklahoma's Jordy Bahl Saw This Coming Last Fall

On a podcast that aired this weekend, Oklahoma's star pitcher described how she lost her competitive fire and began "playing scared" prior to this season.

John E. Hoover

The softball world was rocked Monday when Oklahoma ace Jordy Bahl announced she was leaving OU and returning to her home state of Nebraska.

In reality, there have been rumors and more since Oklahoma’s after-party on Thursday night, hours after taking down Florida State for the Sooners’ third straight national championship, that Bahl would be entering the NCAA Transfer Portal.

But for Bahl, it sounds like she knew long before Thursday.

On a podcast published this weekend, Bahl described how she “didn’t feel like myself” last fall during the Sooners’ challenging intrasquad scrimmages — and still struggles with it, she said.

“Amidst all of this, I just can't find that fire,” Bahl told performance psychiatrist and “mindset coach” Larry Widman, who hosts the Max Out Mindset Podcast. “Like, I feel like I play with a fire and it's always just come to me and I've always been very emotionally driven on the field, and that's where I can kick into the next gear is when the emotions start taking over. But I just had a total lack of emotion.”

OU coach Patty Gasso said in a statement that Bahl told the OU coaches on Friday that she’d been “feeling a strong need to be closer to home for quite some time and planned to enter the transfer portal.”

Gasso called Bahl “the ultimate competitor,” a quality that shone through any time she allowed baserunners or was asked to come in out of the bullpen to squelch a rally. Bahl threw more 24 scoreless innings to finish the season — most of it against the best of the best at the College World Series in Oklahoma City.

But while she high-fived and fist-pumped and hugged and laughed her way to another championship by retiring one opposing batter after another, Bahl still struggled with her confidence and her own personal mojo.

FOR MORE: 

Listen to the entire Max Out Mindset Podcast with Jordy Bahl

“Trying to compete at that high level every day, to where I can go against my own teammates — who are the best hitters in the country — but not feeling like myself the entire time and constantly trying to search for that fire and that next gear that I can't take it into,” she said, “that was one of the hardest things to start to overcome.

“And so that entire time I'm like, ‘Man, I'm just not competitive anymore. Like, why am I not competitive? And I'm letting all these thoughts spiral through my head and the more that they would spiral through my head, the more I would start to psych myself out, and then when that started to happen, now I'm not feeling like I'm prepared when I go into the game and I am feeling a sense of doubt.

“And so what started to happen is now I'm holding on way too tight and I'm not playing free whatsoever. I'm like, in a sense, playing scared.”

Jordy Bahl
Jordy Bahl :: John E. Hoover / AllSooners

Bahl said getting herself out of that was “so tough, but it just comes back to one being able to trust my training and knowing that every day I show up, I'm still giving it everything I have. And so that's all anyone can ever ask of yourself. And so if you're giving it everything you have, what more can you ask for? So just remembering that helps me to kind of take a deep breath and be like, ‘OK, I'm doing my best. It's not going to be perfect, but I'm doing my best. I can't ask for anything more.’ ”

When the fall softball season started, Bahl was coming off a forearm injury that limited her in the postseason. Then when the spring season began, she struggled with her control and yielded more walks and hit batters than she was used to. Her earned run average rose to 2.66 over the first month of the season before she regained her form and her dominance, and she finished second in the nation with a 0.90 ERA.

“On top of just trusting your training,” Bahl said, “is realizing that this is still just a game and I'm putting a lot more pressure on myself than there actually needs to be. So I think just a big takeaway from that is how fast that self talk can spiral into a good or bad direction.”

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John E. Hoover
JOHN E. HOOVER

John is an award-winning journalist whose work spans five decades in Oklahoma, with multiple state, regional and national awards as a sportswriter at various newspapers. During his newspaper career, John covered the Dallas Cowboys, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the Arkansas Razorbacks and much more. In 2016, John changed careers, migrating into radio and launching a YouTube channel, and has built a successful independent media company, DanCam Media. From there, John has written under the banners of Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Fan Nation and a handful of local and national magazines while hosting daily sports talk radio shows in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and statewide. John has also spoken on Capitol Hill in Oklahoma City in a successful effort to put more certified athletic trainers in Oklahoma public high schools. Among the dozens of awards he has won, John most cherishes his national "Beat Writer of the Year" from the Associated Press Sports Editors, Oklahoma's "Best Sports Column" from the Society of Professional Journalists, and Two "Excellence in Sports Medicine Reporting" Awards from the National Athletic Trainers Association. John holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications from East Central University in Ada, OK. Born and raised in North Pole, Alaska, John played football and wrote for the school paper at Ada High School in Ada, OK. He enjoys books, movies and travel, and lives in Broken Arrow, OK, with his wife and two kids.

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