OU Softball: Remembering How Patty Gasso Got to Oklahoma, and How She Nearly Left

Humble beginnings eventually led her to coach the Sooners, where she's had "ups and downs" that included early self-doubts and became six national championships (so far).

BRYAN TERRY/THE OKLAHOMAN-USA TODAY NETWORK

On the eve of another Women’s College World Series, remembering the unlikely story of how Patty Gasso got to Oklahoma — and how close she came to leaving more than 20 years ago — is a tale worth retelling.

With six national championships on the wall (and overwhelming favorites to win a seventh) and an all-time NCAA winning streak of 48 straight in their pocket, it’s easy to forget OU wasn’t always a softball Goliath, and Gasso wasn’t always a hall of famer.

Growing up in a single-parent home in the 1970s in Southern California, Gasso “knew nothing” of Oklahoma, or Norman, or Oklahoma City, or the euphoric mountaintop where the sport of softball would eventually take her.

She came out of Torrance and played college softball at El Camino City College and at Long Beach State.

Then the legacy began — really without her even knowing.

“I knew I wanted to be a teacher and a coach, and growing up, through high school, there still wasn’t a ton of college softball around me,” Gasso told AllSoonners in 2020. “I wasn’t on a travel-ball team or anything like that. So my idea was, you know, hopefully I can play in college and then I’ll be a high school teacher and high school coach.”

Patty Gasso :: BRYAN TERRY / THE OKLAHOMAN-USA TODAY NETWORK

Gasso actually began her profession as a basketball coach. Soon, she was coaching high school softball. Five years later, in 1990, she was coaching at Long Beach City College.

“Which was closer to my house,” Gasso said.

Gasso said LBCC was “not a good team, not a good program. So it was definitely a challenge. And I learned a lot from it.”

But it was the right move at the right time, and she didn’t even realize it.

Her new athletic director was Mickey Davis, an old-school softball luminary who now has her own entry in the National Softball Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

Also in 1990, the NCAA moved its softball national championship tournament to Oklahoma City, where Davis would send her coaching staff every other summer to watch some high-level games and make contacts in the business.

Patty Gasso (left) :: John E. Hoover / SI Sooners

One summer, Gasso took it upon herself to shake hands with the tournament director. That’s when she met Marita Hynes.

Hynes was the former OU softball coach who won 257 games in eight seasons with the Sooners. She eventually had become an OU administrator and, in 1994, she was hiring a new softball coach.

Then-AD Donnie Duncan trusted Hynes to make the hire. During a national search, she kept hearing about this rising young star out west. She called her friend and colleague — LBCC's Mickey Davis — and asked, “Do we need to be talking to your softball coach?”

“I just have a lot of faith and trust in Mickey,” Hynes said, “so I made the phone call and got Patty to come in.”

Other than her occasional trips to Oklahoma City for the WCWS, Gasso said, “I didn’t know anything about OU. I didn’t even know if they had a softball program. I’d never heard of them in softball. But I remember watching — there was probably about 1,200 people there (in OKC), and I was just in absolute astonishment that 1,200 people were watching a softball game. It was, like, mesmerizing. Like, out of my mind. Oh my gosh, I just couldn’t believe it.”

Gasso had been pregnant with firstborn son J.T. when she took the LBCC job. Now she was five months pregnant with her second son, D.J. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go through that process again.

Patty Gasso  / OU Athletics

“I thought, ‘OK, well, I don’t know anything about it, but I’ll just go,’ ” Gasso said. “I remember coming to OU and the first person I met was Kelvin Sampson. There was no softball stadium, so we drove by Reeves Park. At night!

“We were driving by and they were like, ‘That’s where the team plays, but let’s go look at the football stadium,’ ” Gasso said. “I was like, ‘OK.’ I’d never seen a football stadium. Not like that. I’m like, ‘Wow! Oh my gosh! Wow, this is amazing!’ “

Gasso has taken a lot of recruits on that same tour over the years — “the softball stadium is down that street, but let’s go look at the football stadium.” With Marita Hynes Field entering the picture 25 years ago, and now with Love’s Field on the horizon, those tours have been less and less.

So in 1994, Gasso and her husband Jim decided to risk it and relocate their family to an unknown place. She accepted the job, and Jim also got a gig in the OU athletic department. She was living outside of California for the first time, and she was scared.

She also had to take a pay cut.

“I was actually making less money at OU than I was at Long Beach City College,” Gasso said. “But I took the job because I felt like … I wanted to try to go Division I.”

“Those were not ideal conditions,” Hynes said.

Patty Gasso :: Bryan Terry / The Oklahoman-USA Today Network

The first person Gasso spoke with after taking the job was an outgoing U.S. Senator and former Oklahoma governor by the name of David Boren.

“He had just taken the OU (president's) job,” she said. “Yeah. … And I wasn’t quite sure I was doing the right thing. We knew no one — no one — in Oklahoma. Literally no one.”

In her first five years, Gasso won three Big 12 championships and 230 games. But she said the family was always homesick for California.

“I thought going from junior college to college would be the natural step — and it wasn’t even close,” Gasso said. “I was so underwater. Not only being pregnant with a 7-year-old. But also away from home, no family, no friends. But I was not left a lot of anything. So I was really having to do research and start from ground zero. Truly. It was difficult.

“But I went back to my roots, which was junior college, and I brought in a bunch of JC kids from California, a couple from Arizona that I knew of, and I tried to build off of that until we could get things going.”

Still, doubt crept in. Gasso eventually thought maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t the right coach for Oklahoma.

Patty Gasso :: Ryan Chapman / AllSooners.com

In her first year, they played Arizona — national champs in 1993, '94, '96 and '97 — in College Station, TX, and lost 12-1. Later that year they took on the Wildcats in a pair in Tucson and went down 7-0 and 13-5. Four days later, OU was throttled 19-1 and 11-3. The following year, the Sooners were crushed at Arizona 10-0 — twice in three days.

In all, Gasso lost her first 10 matchups with Mike Candrea’s Arizona squads. The Wildcats were the epitome of softball excellence — owners of a 47-game winning streak and everything — and Gasso realized how far away the Sooners were from that.

Last weekend, when Gasso was trying to put her team’s new all-time winning streak in perspective, she recalled those early beatdowns and the lessons they provided.

“Because it’s Arizona and Mike Candrea and what Arizona did back in the day was phenomenal,” Gasso said Friday after taking down Clemson in the first game of the Norman Super Regional. “And he is the reason why I had to learn how to do things different. Because when I was here as a young coach, he was run-ruling the daylights out of us. I just had to take it and learn. And I told him that. We’ve become good enough friends that we share those things.”

In 1998, OU went 49-15 and came painfully close to making it out of the Amherst Regional. In 1999, the Sooners went 40-16 and won the Big 12 again, but lost their regional at Baton Rouge.

That was enough, she said.

Patty Gasso :: BRYAN TERRY/THE OKLAHOMAN-USA TODAY NETWORK

“The season of 2000, my husband and I pretty much agreed, this was gonna be our last season at OU,” Gasso said. “He had gotten a job back in California coaching soccer at Fullerton Junior College, and it was, ‘OK, I’m gonna be done this season, I’m gonna put in my resignation and I’m gonna go back to California and see what life has for me back there.’”

It wasn’t just the softball. Raising two young boys under the pressure of being a Division I coach and working for a pedestrian salary and not living up to her own high standards had begun to take a toll.

“I didn’t think I could survive living my life like this because it was so engulfing,” she said. “It just owned my life. And I’m trying to raise two kids?

“The reason why I was gonna go back was I just didn’t feel like I was doing a very good job at either,” Gasso said. “I wasn’t giving enough time to my kids, yet I needed to get on the recruiting trail. I was on the phone, every night, trying to recruit over the phone.

“I will always remember, my youngest son, I would read him a book to go to bed, and I would always fall asleep first. He was always waking me up, ‘Mom! Finish! Finish!’ It was just constantly like that. But I was gonna go back because I just felt like I wasn’t being good at anything. I was being average as a coach and as a mother.

“And in 2000, we won a national championship, and a lot of things changed — in the way of pay, the stadium additions, things like that. So the rest, from there, is kind of history.”

Jocelyn Alo and Patty Gasso  :: John E. Hoover / AllSooners

The Sooners went 66-8 that season (they still lost 6-0 at Arizona but beat the Wildcats in the World Series) and have only gotten better as Gasso’s coaching evolved with the times.

“I’ve had to personally grow in a lot for ways,” she said. “I’ve had some ups and downs.”

Gasso said as the winning has ramped up, so has the pressure to keep winning. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming, but it has its own rewards.

“I get caught up in that and then I look at my players and I’m like, ‘What am I thinking?’ ” she said. “Because it’s not about what people say or what people want. It’s about what I’m supposed to give to my players.”

After her induction into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2022, Gasso said she still wasn’t comfortable in the spotlight.

“I’m not playing the game,” she said. “I’m orchestrating, but (players are) playing the instruments. And the instruments is what makes the beautiful music. It’s not the conductor waving his wand. That’s just how I think of myself, so I feel just not worthy.

“But then I just went back and I had one short moment on how far we’ve come, and I’m very prideful with the level of consistency. And I’m very prideful that I have great relationships with my former athletes — some that I coached in high school, junior college and even at OU.”

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