Oklahoma softball head coach Patty Gasso wasn’t quite sure what to expect this season. The team had to replace a legendary senior class that won four straight national championships, while also becoming a new member of the brutal Southeastern Conference.
For the Sooners to have a chance at a five-peat, their newcomers — freshmen as well as transfers — needed to deliver and help the handful of key players who remained from the 2024 team. That is precisely what’s happened.
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Freshman shortstop Gabbie Garcia leads the team in home runs (20) and RBIs (58). Louisiana transfer pitcher Sam Landry is 23-4 with a 1.92 ERA. Two other transfers, infielder Ailana Agbayani and catcher Isabela Emerling, have started a combined 109 games.
Oklahoma earned the No. 1 seed for the SEC Tournament with a 17-7 conference record and reached the championship game, but that had to be canceled due to inclement weather. The Sooners then won all three of their NCAA Regional games by mercy rule, which set up a Super Regional against conference-foe Alabama.
They shut out the Crimson Tide on Friday, 3-0, and run-ruled them with a 13-2 victory on Saturday to reach the Women’s College World Series for the ninth year in a row.
THE SOONERS ADVANCE TO THEIR NINTH STRAIGHT COLLEGE WORLD SERIES 🔥
Oklahoma has the longest active streak in D1 👏 pic.twitter.com/RGeJ1YqkDQ
— ESPN (@espn) May 24, 2025
Though the names have changed and this year’s team has forged its own identity, the foundation of the program is the same: a championship culture rooted in faith. New spiritual leaders have emerged to replace the ones who have left.
“This team is so new, but yet it feels like we’ve all known each other for, like, our whole lives, which is really cool,” Kierston Deal, who picked up the win Saturday and was baptized last year, said after the game. “So just creating that culture and just trusting each other and trusting our coaching staff and trusting the Lord, honestly.”
Freshman sensation Garcia has come up huge in her first postseason, starting with a walk-off three-run home run against Arkansas in the semifinals of the SEC Tournament.
File this under 🎥
↳📂OU Softball
↳📂Sooner Magic
↳📂Gabbie_Garcia_2025 pic.twitter.com/23skmiiT4Y— Oklahoma Softball (@OU_Softball) May 9, 2025
She recently came on Sports Spectrum’s “What’s Up” podcast and explained that she prepared for that at-bat by praying.
“It was actually very emotional for me just because of the whole situation before that,” Garica said. “It was really emotional. I was praying before my at-bat. I was really just leaning into, ‘No matter what the result, God is with me. My teammates are with me. My family is with me. It does not matter what happens at the end of the day.'”
The Arkansas game was just the beginning, though. She went deep two more times in the Regionals and hit two more home runs in the second win over Alabama in the Super Regionals. A quarter of her home runs have come in the last six games.
pass the bat • play for each other 🤞
homers 19 ➕20 for 4️⃣2️⃣ pic.twitter.com/xN9Qu3Y5Ko
— Oklahoma Softball (@OU_Softball) May 25, 2025
Deal and Garcia are just two of the many Oklahoma players who openly share their faith. The team has started a tradition of putting four fingers up to celebrate. It is a reference to the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the Book of Daniel, where God protects them in a fiery furnace.
With God as their metaphorical fourth man in the fire, the Sooners play knowing they are not defined by the outcome of a game or the external pressure placed on them because of the program’s success.
“It’s just a joyful feeling,” Garcia said on the podcast. “You’re freeing yourself of all of that burden, and you’re giving it to Him. It’s removing that fear of failure. As soon as you remove that outcome-based thinking, it’s so freeing.”
The path was different, but Oklahoma is peaking at the right time yet again. The Sooners (50-7) face another SEC opponent, Tennessee (45-15), in their first game at the WCWS on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. ET. They will face either Florida or Texas in their second game.
As Oklahoma goes for an unprecedented fifth national title in a row, Garcia is not worried about what anyone on the outside thinks.
“It’s been a different year than I feel like a lot of people realize,” she said on the podcast. “Everyone keeps talking about how we’re a young team and everything, setting these boundaries on us. I feel like we’ve just gotten to that point where we’re here for ourselves, and we’re playing to serve. And we’re playing for each other.”
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