OKLAHOMA CITY — The Texas Longhorns know how this looks. Worse, they know how it feels: There is nothing remotely enjoyable about being on the wrong end of an extraordinary hitting clinic from the best offense in the history of college softball. Not in any situation, and certainly not in the context of a championship series, triggering a win-or-go-home Game 2.
But Texas is used to having its back against the wall. In order to become the first unseeded team ever to make the final round of the Women’s College World Series, it played six elimination games this postseason, and it managed to win them all. Now it must face a seventh.
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After a 16–1 loss to No. 1 Oklahoma in the first game of the national championship on Wednesday, the odds look almost impossibly long for Texas, down to its last shot in the best-of-three series. The team will have a physically daunting task on the field Thursday. And it has one that is just as mentally daunting right now—finding a way to move on.
“Just remember that the worst has already happened,” said Texas senior catcher Mary Iakopo. “Play carefree and loose. That’s all we can do.”
If “the worst has already happened” might feel a tad extreme—go back and look at that score again. Oklahoma’s 16 runs tied the most ever in a WCWS game. A loss of this magnitude is an unprecedented outcome on this stage, but in a sense, it’s fitting: Oklahoma is an unprecedented favorite, No. 1 wire to wire this season, and Texas is an unprecedented underdog, the only unseeded team to make it this far. The experience was miserable. Now the Longhorns need to find a way to make sure it does not happen again.
“Nothing from today carries over,” said Texas pitcher Hailey Dolcini, who was knocked out in the first inning. “So you learn from it and you try not to make the same mistakes again. Then we just come out and play loose. I think we lost a little bit of that today.”
The Longhorns managed to get on the board in the first inning by taking advantage of some uncharacteristic shakiness from Sooners pitcher Hope Trautwein—a two-out double followed by three consecutive walks brought in a run. For a few minutes, Texas was able to enjoy its early 1–0 lead, something that is almost vanishingly rare: The Sooners entered Wednesday having outscored their opponents in the first inning by a margin of 111–5. To get on the board first was not just a good sign for Texas but, it seemed, perhaps even a necessary one.
And then it was Oklahoma’s turn to hit.
The Sooners wasted no time in emphasizing their claim to the best offense in the sport. Leadoff hitter Jayda Coleman doubled. Behind her, NCAA slugging queen Jocelyn Alo crushed a ball to left for her first home run of the game. The Longhorns had already lost their lead, with two runs from the first two hitters faced, and they would never get it back.
“They punched first, but we punched back,” Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso said. “And we punched harder.”
Indeed. The Sooners batted around in the first to build a 5–1 lead. They’d go on to score at least once in every inning. By the third, Oklahoma had tied the record for most home runs in a WCWS game with four. By the fifth, it had broken the record with six. Of the nine starters, eight recorded a hit, and the ninth still walked and scored. It was an overwhelming display of firepower—the absolute best of a team that has made a habit of being the best.
“It was like an avalanche,” said Texas coach Mike White. “Once it starts going, it starts gathering steam, and it's harder to get it to stop.”
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Yet his team’s focus for Thursday is not as much on run prevention as it is on run scoring. As White sees it, Oklahoma’s offense cannot be blocked entirely. (The Sooners’ best-in-the-nation hitters were never shut out this season; they scored at least twice in each of their three losses.) So the Longhorns’ goal for Thursday is not to stop a seemingly unstoppable force—it’s simply to do their best to outdo it.
“We’ve got to score runs to beat them,” White said. “They're going to put up some numbers—four or five—we’ve got to find a way to score seven. That's the way it is.”
In Wednesday’s unraveling, Texas began pressing and swung at too many pitches out of the zone, speeding the game up instead of slowing it down. The mantra for Game 2 will be to go in the opposite direction. The same goes for the defense, which rushed at times and ended up with four errors. And in the circle, Texas is likely to have sophomore transfer Estelle Czech, who pitched a complete game shutout in the last round against No. 6 Oklahoma State: While the team went through four pitchers Wednesday, it left her untouched. (White would not commit to naming Czech as Thursday's starter, but when asked if he had deliberately kept her out of Game 1 to keep her fresh for Game 2, he smiled and said, “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”) As for the rest? They can only try to forget.
“Tomorrow’s a new day—a new game,” said Longhorns center fielder Bella Dayton. “We’re starting 0–0. We’re starting fresh.”
