CWS Hero Dayton Tockey and Oklahoma Have His Colorful Mom to Thank

Perhaps no player on the Oklahoma roster is more emblematic of the Sooners’ 2026 baseball season than Dayton Tockey.

Both began the year with great expectations. Both started the season start red hot. Both endured a disappointing and prolonged slump. And both ultimately were recharged at the plate to make an unlikely, almost historic postseason run.

And every step of the way, Tockey’s mom has been by his side, in the stands, and in his heart.

“They've had kind of a long year, if you will,” Kristi Gilpin told Sooners On SI in a phone interview Tuesday night from her home in Fort Worth. “And so everybody was like, ‘It couldn't happen for a better kid.’

“But again, it could happen for any of those kids and it would have been awesome, no matter who it was.”

OU opens College World Series play against Alabama on Saturday at 2 p.m. inside Charles Schwab Field in downtown Omaha. The Sooners went 1-2 against the Crimson Tide this year, and would need to beat Bama and the other two SEC teams on their side of the bracket and get to the championship series.

OU was an underdog in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament. But nobody is counting the Sooners out in Omaha. They were a similar underdog in 2022 and made it all the way to the CWS championship series before losing to Ole Miss.

As they have roared through the postseason and Tockey has gone nuclear at the plate, his mom has somehow become something of a media sensation. Like many parents, she’s at virtually every game. But unlike many parents, the TV cameras have found her — repeatedly.

In six postseason games, Tockey — a senior first baseman from Fort Worth — is hitting .417 in the NCAA Tournament (10-of-24) with five of his eight home runs this year and 9 of his 22 RBIs. He’s homered in three consecutive games — all wins.

WE'RE GOING TO KANSAS, Y'ALL 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/C1NIK2jQUe
— Oklahoma Baseball (@OU_Baseball) June 1, 2026

Her reaction to the game-winner at Georgia Tech was priceless: hands over her face at the swing, tracking the baseball between semi-closed fingers (and without turning her head), followed by a sheepish smile, sudden tears and a tsunami of hugs and pats on the back from fellow OU parents as her son joyfully bounced around the bases.

“Yeah, it's sweet,” Tockey said last week. “No doubt.”

Tockey and the Sooners have taken the college baseball world by storm — upsetting No. 2 national seed Georgia Tech in the Atlanta Regional and then sweeping No. 15 Kansas last week in the Lawrence Super Regional — thanks largely to Tockey’s 10th-inning, walk-off home run to finish off the second of OU’s two massive rallies against the Yellow Jackets.

While her son’s celebrity exploded, Gilpin — who credits pitcher Reid Hensley’s mom Jamie for even helping her get to Atlanta in the first place and says the OU parents group is “unique” and “pretty awesome” — reluctantly became a celebrity in her own way.

“I would get some texts here and there throughout the weekend,” Tockey said. “Like, ‘Oh wow, they're showing your mom.’ Like, ‘Oh, really?’ Because I don't really go back and watch the games. But like, I would get videos sent to me, like, mid-game of her, and I'm like, ‘Yeah, she's ridiculous,’ just on the screen the whole time.

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“But it's sweet that she got to be there, and I'm glad she was there.”

Tockey’s moment — Gilpin’s too — has been shared countless times on social media. She’s easy to find because of that ballcap emblazoned with “TOCKEY” across the front, and usually something similar on a shirt to go with it. (She makes the shirts and those aren't for sale, but Tockey does have his own line of merchandise available for purchase.)

While Tockey was giving ESPN a postgame interview following his big bomb, he was asked about his doting mother, and said he hadn’t seen her yet — and didn’t know where she was at the moment.

"Everybody underestimated the Sooners."😤

Dayton Tockey after walking off No. 2 Georgia Tech to advance to the Supers 🔥 pic.twitter.com/GCou5qXqRv
— SEC Network (@SECNetwork) June 1, 2026

That’s because she’d already left her seat and was on the field level waiting for him to finish his interview.

“He was pretty emotional too, which is different for Dayton,” she said. “He's very humble. Very, you know, kind of doesn't — he has a poker face, if you will. So to see him get emotional like that … people were saying, like on Twitter, talking about when Dayton started talking about me, and he got emotional, they were like, ‘OK well, he has our hearts now.’ Like, ‘How do you not love the kid?

“So, I mean, it was pretty awesome. I just couldn't wait to literally just hug his neck and tell him how proud I was of him. Because I've known what he's gone through, and it hasn't been easy. … That's literally all I could say, is ‘I’m so damn proud of you.’ ”

After transferring to OU from Weatherford Community College last year, Tockey batted .271 with seven home runs and 32 RBIs in 42 games. That included the Sooners’ opener at Georgia, when he went 4-for-4 at the plate with two home runs and five RBIs. (He wore an Atlanta Braves hat in a recent podcast interview; his mom says he’s not really a Braves fan, but clearly the Peach State brings out his best).

But late in that game, he suffered a severe ankle injury, and missed almost a month — then came back before he was fully healed, his mom said. His batting average was a career-best .293 after that game, but he went hitless the rest of the season (0-for-11 in four games).

Gilpin — who actually wasn’t at that game and said she didn’t know what to do after seeing the injury on TV — said that “set him back a little bit” and he was sidelined and unable to regain any confidence until late in the summer league season, when he was picked up by a "random" team.

Oklahoma Sooners Dayton Tocke — Oklahoma first baseman Dayton Tockey felt like the King of the World in Lawrence. | Evert Nelson/The Capital-Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

So, after a productive fall season back in Norman, Tockey had great expectations for 2026 — which quickly became less so.

Tockey was starting again at first base as OU mowed through Texas Tech, Oklahoma State and TCU in the Shriner’s College Showdown at Globe Life Field in Arlington, TX, and he finished the weekend with three hits (including a home run) and five RBIs.

He went hitless for four games, then dropped three hits, another homer and five RBIs on Gonzaga as OU eventually opened the season 11-2.

Tockey then went into another slump: 0-for-11 in March. April was a little better — 4-for-18 — but his batting average dipped to .176. The Sooners also started SEC play, in which they dropped their last four series of the season.

He was hitting just .185 when coach Skip Johnson inserted him back in the lineup for the final game of the Tennessee series at Bricktown Ballpark — the Sooners’ regular season finale. Hitting from the 8-hole, Tockey drew a fourth-inning walk and eventually came around to score on a wild pitch, and then finished things off with a solo home run in the eighth inning to give OU a 12-9 victory.

That seemingly helped Tockey turn things around, and he’s been smoking ever since.

After going 0-for-2 against LSU in the SEC Tournament, Tockey went 2-for-3 with two runs and two RBIs against The Citadel, 1-for-3 with a run and an RBI against Georgia Tech, 0-for-3 with an RBI against the Citadel, 2-for-2 with two runs against Tech, 2-for-4 with an RBI and a run (the 454-foot, game-winning blast) against Tech, and then 1-for-4 with a three-run home run at Kansas and 2-for-4 with a solo shot against the Jayhawks.

Oklahoma Sooners, Dayton Tockey — Oklahoma first baseman Dayton Tockey. | Carson Field, Sooners On SI

“Obviously I'm really confident right now,” Tockey said, “but it's really just (about) what I did to help the team.”

“It's been real special, because at first you, that's what we were hearing, like, ‘Oh my gosh, they're so good, they're going to Omaha,’ and then it kind of fell off the cliff,” Gilpin said.

“SEC baseball is hard. I mean, they had a very hard schedule, and when our hitting was on, our pitching wasn't. When our pitching was on, our hitting wasn't. So you have to put it all together, and I think … literally since the last game, the very last game against Tennessee, I feel like that's kind of when it all clicked.

“It's crazy how much, and I think they feel like they're having fun again.”

Gilpin said Tockey started playing baseball at the age of 3 — something called “Blastball,” actually.

“It's like where the base honks and all that,” she said. “Yeah, it was terrible.”

The next year — at 4 years old — Tockey played up on an elite “select” travel ball team from Dallas. For Gilpin, that meant two hours in the car commuting to practice and home games and back.

“And they were 6,” she said. “I mean, we traveled and everything. … People think I'm crazy, but he's literally played in the select world since he was 4 years old. … I don't want to sound terrible, but I just didn't think the competition of some of these school kids … played to your level.”

Playing up two years, Tockey split time between outfield and pitcher.

“He's a dang good outfielder,” she said. “ … And he actually holds two ERA records for his 6A high school (Weatherford) here in Texas.

“You can ask him about this: he throws a nasty knuckleball for a strike. Every time. It's ridiculous. Ask him, he’ll tell you.”

Baseball was pretty much his only sport. But it didn't have to be.

She said he grew up playing “a little basketball in junior high, and he'll tell you, 'My mom didn't let me play football,’ but I didn't because I knew where he was talented, and I didn't want him risking it for football. I mean, looking back now, I'm like, ‘Damn, he probably could have went to play college football, too.' It's crazy, but he's so (athletic). He could play golf. I mean, he hits the dadgum ball a mile — either way, right or left handed. It's crazy.”

She said Tockey’s dad Dwane played college baseball for a year at Tarleton State. But the overall athletic gene might have come more from his mom’s side. She played basketball, softball and volleyball growing up and in high school.

“There's a TikTok going around saying the athletes get their skill from their moms,” she said with a laugh. “So, I'm just saying. … ”

Tockey’s younger sister, Maris — named after Yankees home run legend Roger Maris, because of course — played Division II volleyball for a year.

Gilpin said between all the sports that Dayton and Maris played growing up, she has a “ridiculous amount of videos on my phone.”

In fact, she has always shot video clips of his at-bats at OU, and sends them to him after each game so he can study his swing.

But, because she inadvertently missed a couple of ABs at the same time he started to heat up in the NCAA Tournament, she wasn’t shooting the big finale at Georgia Tech because she had grown “superstitious.”

Which, looking back, wasn’t all bad as the ESPN cameraman found her and locked in on a nervous mom.

“Very nervous,” she said. “My watch was dead literally the whole weekend. If my watch was charged, I mean, it probably would have been like, ‘You need to go to the ER.’ Like, your heart rate is out of control.’ Like, ‘Are you working out? What are we doing?’

“So, yeah, it was — it was a pretty special moment, for sure.”

“It was sweet,” Tockey said. “She just hugged me and told me how proud she was of me, and she told me she loved me.”

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