OKLAHOMA CITY — Sooner red dominated the stands at Oklahoma City’s Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark as softball fanatics packed the stadium for Saturday’s Home Run Derby X. The Sooner Schooner — the famed University of Oklahoma wagon — circled the warning track, the school’s fight song played over the loud speaker and Sooners head coach Patty Gasso threw out the first pitch in celebration of the event.
In the end, it came down to a faceoff between a team of three decorated Sooners — Jocelyn Alo, Tiare Jennings, and Kinzie Hansen as the first all-female team in HRDX history — going up against a Dodgers team consisting of Adrian González and two more Sooners Women’s College World Series winners in Sydney Romero and Jayda Coleman in the final.
For a brief moment, it seemed like Jocelyn Alo had given the All-Sooners team, decked out in the exact same uniforms they had last worn when they won the WCWS together, an unsurmountable victory. Alo — who holds the record for most NCAA home runs in history for both men and women — blasted moonshot after moonshot into the darkening OKC sky. Her home runs were hit so hard and so high — a few even bouncing off the roof of the brick batter’s eye in center field — that an endless chorus of “oohs!” followed her every swing…