OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma Sooners capped an extraordinary, record-setting season with a two-game sweep of Texas to win the Women’s College World Series for the second year in a row.

OU (59-3) has now won six national championships, including four of the last seven. Only UCLA (12) and Arizona (8) have won more.

The Sooners started slow but wound up beating the Longhorns 10-5 June 9 crowd of 12,257 at USA Softball Stadium They crushed Texas 16-1 in the opening game on Jun 8.

Was this the best softball team ever?

Consider these stats:

• All-American Jocelyn Alo became the career leader in home runs (122) and the first player in history to hit 30 home runs and bat .500 in the same season. She ended 2022 with a .512 batting average.
• Sooner All Americans Jayda Coleman (.419), Tiare Jennings (.400) and Grace Lyons (.400) all finished with a batting average of .400 or better.
• Freshman pitcher Jordy Bahl had a sparkling 22-1 record with 1.16 earned run average. She had 207 strikeouts in 145 1/3 innings.
• OU has five first-team All Americans.
• Oklahoma broke their own record with 17 home runs during the WCWS. They also set a record for total runs scored during the WCWS with 64.
• Alo became the only player in NCAA Division I softball history to lead the country in home runs in three different seasons.
• OU set the WCWS Single-Game margin of victory (15 runs) against Texas.
• During the season, OU posted 41 run-rule victories, 33 shutouts, eight no-hitters, held opponents to one run or fewer 49 times and hit home runs in 56 of 62 games.

“I would say with me being a senior, I think this is the best team,” Alo said, who is a senior. “But one thing about Sooner softball, and I’ve seen it year in and year out, is they just continue to get better. I don’t know what holds next year, but I know that they could be a run for the best team too and years to come. I just think Sooner softball will continually climb and keep climbing the ladder. I think you should be excited for what’s being to.”

OU coach Patty Gasso would not say the Sooners are the best of all time.

“I’m going to let you decide,” Gasso told reporters afterward. “You guys all have the stats and all that stuff. I could rank them very, very high, if not the highest, because everything they do looks so easy to me, and they do it so fast.”

Even with sparkling offense statistics, Gasso praised the Sooner defense.

Thursday night, rightfielder Rylie Boone saved a home run by catching a ball on the warning track even though she was looking directly into the sun.

Centerfielder Jayda Coleman caught back-to-back deep fly ball to help hold Texas to only two runs in the first inning.

“I was a little sick to my stomach for a second as I saw it getting some distance,” Gasso said of Coleman’s first catch. “If Jayda could get up on the wall and reach, she’s going to catch it, and I know that about her. She is an incredible, incredible athlete.”

It was a series of crucial defensive plays against a Texas team that was desperate for a win.

“That was a big momentum turn for us because easily the score could have looked a lot different than 2-0,” Gasso said. “I was really proud of her efforts and trying to make some things happen defensively. I told the team before we even started in this tournament defense plays a huge role. Now, hitting, timely hitting, pitching, but defense can make or break you.”

OU tied the score at 2-2 in the fourth inning but then rallied behind a three-run homer by catcher Kinzie Hansen before increasing the lead to 10-2.

Gasso inserted her seniors in the seventh inning because the lead was so great. Texas countered with a three-run homer with two outs in the bottom of the seventh but OU hung on for the 10-5 victory.

Even so, Gasso second-guessed that decision.

“First I’m like, ‘What a fool. I just blew it. Here comes Texas coming back, and I’m trying to give Joce a hurrah,’ ” Gasso said. “I was like, ‘I shouldn’t have listened to (son) J.T. Gasso, who told me to do that.”

Alo is a fifth-year senior and will play professionally, either in the Women’s Professional Fastpitch league or Athletes Unlimited, where she was drafted No. 1 overall in May.

“Man, she loves the Sooners,” Gasso said of Alo. “She loves the state. She loves everything about OU, and she just wanted to feed the OU fan base everything that she had. She left it. She left it on that field, and she left it in the history books forever.”