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Mindy Johnson was just 19 when she was asked to help the University of Oklahoma hire a new head softball coach in 1994. Looking back now, she’s amazed she was put in that position.
Johnson and Cindy Ambrose were the two players from that year’s team selected to participate in the school’s hiring process. They went to the airport to pick up candidates. They took them to dinner. They sat in on interviews. And a handful of their teammates got to meet and grill each coach, too.
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“I’m sure the candidates thought, like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’” Johnson said, laughing. “There was a lot of confusion and chaos. It was just crazy. All of us had been recruited by someone different.”
Oklahoma ultimately hired Patty Gasso in October 1994. Pregnant at the time with her second son DJ, who would be born a few months later, Gasso had decided to move more than 1,300 miles and two time zones away from her previous post at Long Beach City College to take over a softball program that played its home games at a city park also used for slow-pitch adult beer league softball.
“There was no stadium, there’s no field,” said Gasso, now 60. “I’m the California kid. I wanted to coach in California. That’s where my family was, but a junior college coach from Long Beach is not going to get a D-I job in California. What are you going to do?”
So she jumped at the opportunity at Oklahoma, not knowing that someday her name would be synonymous with the school itself after five national titles, with this week’s Women’s College World Series finals against rival Texas an opportunity to make it six. After a 43-23 record in Gasso’s debut season, the final year of Big Eight Conference play, Oklahoma won the Big 12 regular season and tournament championships in 1996 and launched a 25-year climb to the top of the sport from there. “It was a shot in the dark,” Johnson said. “She knew that it was her chance.”
Without pomp and circumstance, with a bunch of players Gasso didn’t recruit, in a city park littered with glass bottles and trash, the Oklahoma dynasty began.
Gasso’s Sooners won it all in 2000, 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2021. (Brett Rojo / USA Today)In 1994, the Sooners had gone 58-15 under head coach Jim Beitia, coming one game short of reaching the program’s first Women’s College World Series. But after just one season at the helm, Beitia left to start Tennessee’s softball program. He has said over the years he knew how loaded that roster was when he departed. So many of those players had come to Oklahoma to play for him specifically.
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Gasso won over some of the players right away, but not all of them. The team had split into factions over who they preferred to replace Beitia. At times, they acted out or talked back. Players on her later teams would recall that Gasso’s first team “gave her the hardest time” and served as the biggest challenge of her career.
“When (Gasso) first came in, we all didn’t have the warm and fuzzies,” said Laura Purser Collins, who had transferred to play for Beitia from Barry University, a Division III program. “It was like, who is this coach coming in from some JUCO? What does she know about softball? How are we going to win a title or something with a new coach? We were just young kids, concerned about the change. How silly we were not knowing that we were getting the best coach in the country — in the history of softball, probably.
“We were getting this legend, and we were skeptics.”
Purser Collins worried about her scholarship. Would Gasso take away her money? What about the plan she’d had with Beitia, in which she would redshirt like she had to but then start at shortstop? What if she just didn’t click with the new coach? It all seemed uncertain and scary. So Purser Collins took a recruiting trip to Tennessee and planned on asking for her release from Oklahoma. But the conversation with Gasso shifted her thinking. It changed everything, really.
“She said to me, ‘Do you want to redshirt (at Tennessee) and watch your team go to the World Series? Or do you want to be part of it?’” Purser Collins recalled. “That influenced me. I was like, oh, she knows we’re going to win. … It was clear she wanted me to stay, but the plan may look different. But we were going to win, and we were going to win that year. The confidence that she had, I think she built that into our team.
“If you want kids to believe in anything, you have to believe in it yourself. They have to see that it starts with you.”
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Purser Collins understands that now that she’s older and has spent some time as a coach, too. Sometimes you just have to speak something into existence before you take the first step toward making it happen. Gasso would talk about competing with the Arizonas and UCLAs of the world, because that’s who Oklahoma would have to beat to win national championships.
“She knew that some changes needed to happen,” Purser Collins said. “Any time you go into a new program, you have to feel out who’s gonna buy in and who’s gonna buck up.”
As outfielder Angie Holwell Siegel put it, teams are always going to test a coach’s boundaries. Can players push back on the new strength and conditioning program? Can anyone get away with ignoring a bunt sign during a game? What’s the worst that’ll happen if you’re late to a meeting? Or if you dress sloppily for a road trip? Or if you mess with your teammates’ gloves?
“She did get tested quite a bit,” Siegel said. “But what I loved about her was how she held her ground. She didn’t waffle. Even if she felt like she was on the inside, you would not be able to tell. It was like a poker face. ‘I’m in charge, and you’re going to listen.’ Eventually, she broke (those players), and they were like, ‘OK, we aren’t getting away with any of this stuff anymore.’”
Gasso is known for the high standard she sets for her teams. That includes the early-morning workouts and the commitment to being athletes, not just softball players. It includes requiring players to dress for road trip travel as if they were going to a job interview — dresses, for example, or a nice top and dress pants. Ten-to-15 minutes early was on time, and on time was late. The team would practice how it would jog off the diamond, and how the players would toss the ball around during warmups or after an out. There was a pageantry and a professionalism that Gasso wanted to establish. Her teams would be fun to watch and aesthetically pleasing, all the players working together as one, almost like synchronized swimmers.
Behind the scenes, Gasso was fighting for more resources and better facilities. The stadium that would later be named after former Sooners coach and administrator Marita Hynes (who also helped hire Gasso) would open in 1998, across the street from Reaves Park — where Oklahoma “couldn’t even fit all the players in a dugout,” Gasso said. “We would go over before we would practice picking up beer cans from the night before and (there was) just trash everywhere.”
“At five o’clock, we got kicked off the field for a slow pitch adult beer league,” Johnson remembered. “Or, like, when we were seventh in the country, we got rained out. And it’s like, I’m sorry, there’s no date for y’all to be able to make up that conference game, we have adult slow pitch.’
The Sooners were working from a decided resource disadvantage in Gasso’s early years. (Courtesy of Ashli Barrett Wigington)The softball team did not have its own locker room; there was a room in the fieldhouse near the volleyball players where the athletic department used to store jerseys and uniforms. Players would pick up their gear at the start of the season and not go back to the fieldhouse until the end. Gasso fought for better equipment — gloves! cleats! — and uniform upgrades, everything major college softball programs have now and likely take for granted. The uniforms in the early days were polyester; the players would wet them and try to stretch them out. One year, Louisville Slugger dropped Oklahoma; that season the Sooners had to use an obscure bat brand called Grover.
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“She was so worried about trying to build this team, build this softball program and put us on the map,” Siegel said. “She had so much on her shoulders.”
But Gasso also had a chance to recruit her own players, which helped with the culture and discipline she wanted to instill. That first year, she plugged some holes with junior college transfers. Then, she started to take bigger swings on California players, such as pitcher Lana Moran (whom she landed) and Natasha Watley (who ended up going to UCLA). One big recruit led to another, which led to another, which led to another. Eventually, that’s how you land a Lauren Chamberlain or a Keilani Ricketts.
“It was really by word of mouth,” Gasso said. “As a young coach, I was like, ‘You’re going to have to say no to me. I’m going to make you say no to me.’ I fought like heck to try to get them here.”
And of course, she mixed in Oklahoma-bred talent. She had a knack for finding the right people who would buy in to what she was building, the genuine family atmosphere she strived for — she sometimes took her young kids along on recruiting visits — and a program grounded in her Christian faith. Her teams were close-knit, with relationships that endured far beyond players’ time in Norman. Ashli Barrett Wigington, the catcher on the 2000 national championship team, puts it simply: “They were the ones that were at my wedding, and they were the ones that were there when I buried my dad. They are my family.”
“That’s what’s been part of the secret sauce,” said longtime Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione. “She’s really been exceptionally strong at melding and creating such chemistry.”
Barrett’s batterymate Jennifer Stewart, who was named the Most Outstanding Player of the 2000 WCWS, remembers current players doing a fair bit of evaluating and weeding out during the recruitment process. By the time she and Barrett got to campus, Gasso had recruited multiple classes of players who understood what she was looking for, both athletically and off the field. By the time Stewart was on campus and hosting recruits for visits, she could tell pretty quickly whether a prospect would fit in or not. And she and her teammates could give that feedback directly to the coaching staff.
“I know I did — I was very outspoken,” Stewart said. “But I really do think it’s the upperclassmen who have to mentor and teach the younger players, so that the younger kids really buy into the program.”
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Stewart always felt like the 6 a.m. strength program served as a good test for the incoming players. It was the hardest experience any of them would ever go through, but they learned that it couldn’t break them mentally. They held each other accountable, not letting anyone give up on brutal workouts. They were in it together, and that translated to the field.
“If you think about it, in the beginning, when you are trying to change an attitude or a culture, you have to closely watch it. You micromanage, if you will,” Johnson said. “You have to really implement change and force it. But when people see that this is the way we do it, you just make the right decisions. She doesn’t have to police things like she used to. Because they do it right.”
Gasso’s former players have seen the ways she’s stayed the same over the years as well as the ways she’s changed. Gasso herself has spoken in recent years about learning how to coach without being consumed by the profession. She’s learned how to enjoy life a little more, let go of the 24/7 nature of the job just a tad.
“We always tell her she’s gotten soft,” Barrett said. “She was hardcore. And she still is in the softball realm of it. But I feel like she’s kind of let her guard down as a person. There was so much riding on her winning, to be able to stay there. Her job was dependent on how well we did.”
Castiglione describes it as Gasso evolving and adapting more so than changing who she is or her core values. As many across all sports are finding out, the way you coached players in the mid-1990s isn’t the way you can or should coach them now.
“She’s become an even better coach,” Castiglione said.
Of course, there’s still pressure, but it’s a different kind. It’s pressure to win national championships. It’s the expectation that this year’s team, led by two-time National Player of the Year and NCAA home run queen Jocelyn Alo, should not just make the championship series but win it. That anything less than two wins this week over Texas would amount to failure.
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“Sometimes with football or softball, (fans) get a little spoiled, right? ‘You’re the No. 1 team, go win it all. You should win it all because you’re No. 1,’” Gasso said. “I’m like, wait a minute. It doesn’t quite work that way.”
If she could will her team to victory, she would. She has willed this dynasty into existence, pushing everyone around her to take ownership of what they were building, too. She has hired great staffs and asked her teams to play an exciting brand of softball. She got the players she needed and fostered the team chemistry required to win at the highest level. She sold her vision to people who didn’t always see it — and had the type of success that convinced others to get on board, too.
None of this was preordained. No one knew the risky hire of a Long Beach City College coach would change not just Oklahoma sports history, but the sport of softball forever.
“I’m honestly so proud of her, and I wish I could have been on some of the later-year teams (that won national titles),” Johnson said. “But at the same time, selfishly, I’m glad I was early.
“I get to appreciate what she started with and where she’s at.”
(Top photo of Laura Purser, Brenda Rogers, Mindy Johnson and Rachel Johnson courtesy of Mindy Johnson)
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