Oklahoma CWS Notebook: Sooners to Battle Familiar North Carolina Arm in Game 1

Omaha, NE — The Sooners will see a familiar face on the mound for the Tar Heels in Game 1 of the College World Series championship series on Saturday.

Junior Jason DeCaro is UNC’s probable starter for the series opener. He is 11-2 this year with a 2.31 ERA, and he was a semifinalist for the Golden Spikes Award, given annually to college baseball’s most outstanding player.

Though OU and UNC haven’t squared off in 2026, the Sooners battled against DeCaro in the Chapel Hill Regional last year. He threw six innings and allowed only three earned runs, helping the Tar Heels win 11-5 and eventually advance to Super Regionals.

Outfielder Trey Gambill and infielder Jaxon Willits were both in the lineup against DeCaro in 2025, and they know that it won’t be easy to put up runs against him.

“What I've noticed is he's great at pitching at both sides of the plate, up and down,” Gambill said. “Similar to many pitchers out there in college baseball, you're going to have to be ready.”

Willits said, “I feel like we have a lot of guys that were here that remember what his stuff looked like. We have a good understanding of how he liked to attack us and how he pitched us against us last year.”

Same old Skip

Four years have passed since OU’s 2022 trip to Omaha, when the Sooners lost to Ole Miss in the CWS championship series.

But OU coach Skip Johnson doesn’t believe he’s changed much as a person or a coach since then.

“I think I’m the same guy,” Johnson said. “I still dip snuff, deer hunt, fish… I’m the same guy.”

Though the Sooners didn’t make it to the CWS in the three seasons between 2022 and 2026, they did make it to the regional round of the NCAA Tournament during those years.

Johnson describes himself as a relational coach. And he believes that the buy-in from his players and assistant coaches has allowed the Sooners to make it back to college baseball’s biggest stage.

“That's my biggest deal is the relationship with the players and the coaches,” Johnson said. "That's our job as coaches — to teach them to respect baseball, respect their opponent and play hard. And if we didn’t do that, we wouldn't be up here today.”

Culture led to Tar Heels’ run

Johnson and OU’s players have repeatedly talked about how the Sooners’ culture allowed them to get hot at the right time and make it to the CWS championship series.

North Carolina coach Scott Forbes believes that his group’s culture has also been paramount to its run in Omaha.

“We define culture as how you do things, how we do things around here,” Forbes said. “The players have to buy into it, and they have to believe in it… these guys have been doing that all season.”

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Johnson and Forbes worked against one another on the recruiting trail when they were both assistants. And while they’ll be adversaries this weekend, Johnson has great respect for what Forbes has done with UNC’s program.

“There's a lot of similarities in our programs,” Johnson said. “The culture's really big in that program. We’re facing a good opponent with North Carolina.”

UNC embracing the pressure

Some coaches like to tell their teams that “it’s just another game” when playing for a national title — but not Forbes.

Forbes has only been UNC’s head coach since 2020, but he served as the Tar Heels’ pitching coach from 2006 to 2020. He helped them reach the championship series in back-to-back years — 2006 and 2007 — but UNC fell short in both of those series.

Forbes said he “knows what the emotions are like.” But he has also emphasized the importance of this weekend’s series to his players and assistant coaches over the last 48 hours.

“I used to think, ‘Oh it's just another game’ and say that to the team, but it's not,” Forbes said. “Get the elephant out of the room. Guys, we're playing for a national championship. Let's go ahead and start talking about it.”

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