Oklahoma is Ready for a Washington Squad That is 'Out to Prove a Point'
The Oklahoma Sooners aren’t going to be caught off guard this weekend.
Hosting the 16-seeded Washington Huskies, OU knows how good of a team they are.
Sooners head coach Patty Gasso said as much when she hammered the NCAA Softball Selection Committee for underselling the Huskies, as well as a host of other teams.
“We watched the selection show. We watched them walk off,” Gasso said in a Zoom press conference Tuesday. “And quite honestly, I'm 100 percent behind that because I think it was just a rob job, no doubt.”
The Huskies spent most of the season ranked among the top five teams in the country, finishing with the second-best record in the Pac-12 behind UCLA.
But playing with that extra motivation doesn’t always yield the best results on the field, at least not in Gasso’s experience.
“Washington's out to prove a point, but sometimes when you're trying to prove things, it doesn't work smoothly ... for us at least,” she said.
In preparing for the weekend, Gasso said her team is mainly focused on themselves.
“We’ve got to stay in rhythm of what we've been doing,” she said. “We don't look at what other people are saying or what they're doing or what they're thinking, because we control what we control.
“And that is to play our game and not be bothered by the rest of the noise.”
Entering their biggest series of the year, the No. 1-seeded Sooners are embracing their standing as one of the best teams in softball this season.
“I think with different teams, sometimes we take a hard underdog approach. This team doesn't need that,” Gasso said. “I think they know that they're good, I think they know they're gonna be tough to beat. So, I really don't. It just kind of depends on your team and where they stand. This team feels very confident what they're doing.
“We still can get better. So we're really working to have some good practices before we walk into the weekend.”