WCWS 2022 – Why Oklahoma softball’s dominance extends beyond the batter’s box

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso knew it sounded strange as she said it out loud. Something good came out of a loss? But hold on a second, because she can describe the silver lining of Monday’s 7-3 defeat at the hands of UCLA.

To be put on the brink of elimination like that — to have her team’s dream of winning back-to-back Women’s College World Series titles threatened for the first time all season — was informative, she explained.

“To see our team bow up and step up and say, ‘We’re not going home,'” Gasso said, “that was important.”

Oklahoma’s bats fell uncharacteristically silent during the first game of what turned out to be a doubleheader against UCLA. Home run queen Jocelyn Alo stepped to the plate in the fifth inning as the game’s tying run, and instead of doing what Jocelyn Alo does and sending the ball far over the outfield fence, she struck out swinging. The largely pro-Sooners crowd was stunned by only the team’s third loss of the season.

But there was no panic between games, no fire-and-brimstone speech from Gasso in the roughly 30 minutes they spent waiting to take the field again. All they needed was to hit reset, Alo said, and by the look of the final stat sheet, she was right. Facing elimination, Alo was the hero once again, clubbing a pair of home runs, including a grand slam that brought her RBI total to seven. The 15-0 win was the largest margin of victory in WCWS history.

Lost in the offensive fireworks was the other reason Gasso could tell a group of reporters with a straight face that losing a game was a “blessing.” It proved something to her and her team and maybe even the rest of the country: Hope Trautwein, who last year pitched a perfect game in which she struck out 21 of 21 batters and then chose to transfer to Oklahoma from North Texas during the offseason, is the real deal.

A month ago, the Sooners’ march to the WCWS — a wire-to-wire run as the No. 1 team in softball, with the top ERA and the top batting average in…