Meet the coach: Florida State's Lonni Alameda

May 06, 2024

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.

“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. “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.