Assistant coach JT Gasso during the game against Iowa on March 20.
JT Gasso had his future planned out when he received a call from the one person he couldn’t say no to.
After completing his first season as an assistant coach at Michigan State in 2015, where he coached alongside his now wife, Andrea, a volunteer assistant for the Spartans at the time, Gasso was ready to settle into what he envisioned as his long-term job.
“I thought I was gonna be there for a while,” Gasso said. “I was really planning on building and starting a family out there, and building the program.”
What he thought would be a long-term destination turned into a short stay after he received a call from his mother and Oklahoma head coach Patty Gasso asking him to come home to be the hitting coach at the program he grew up around.
“It was the only place that I would come back to,” JT said. “It’s almost like an offer you can’t refuse, and it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made for our family.”
As he enters his ninth season with OU and first as associate head coach, JT has built OU's offense into a powerhouse and has seen the growth of college softball through the eyes of the program his mother built.
He sees a bright future for the sport, and while it’d be easy for him to look ahead to Patty’s inevitable departure from the program and what his promotion could lead to, JT remains where his feet are.
“I learned very early on that as soon as you start looking beyond where you're at, you’re not where you're at,” JT said. “We owe it to our players and we owe it to the program to be where we're at right now. I'm not looking forward to anything or counting anything down, I'm just trying to be as good as I can be today.”
JT was a kid when he watched his mother take over the team that, at the time, played at Reaves Park, a public park owned by the City of Norman.
While Patty worked her way up the college softball coaching ladder, JT met various softball trailblazers, including legendary UCLA coach Sue Enquist and Michigan coach Carol Hutchins, the NCAA’s all-time wins leader.
He keeps those conversations and lessons in mind when reflecting on the effect his family has had on college softball. To him and Patty, they’re just doing what any of the pioneers before them would’ve done: whatever is best to grow the game.
“One of the things that I've tried to keep with me is knowing what the history is so that I can keep where we're at now in perspective,” JT said. “Because I'm well aware of how things have worked in the past and how it was and just not settling and getting comfortable.
“We're grateful for the university's commitment to progressing our program, progressing women's sports, just just progress in those areas. … We’re very appreciative of where we've been, where we're at, but we also know that we want to just keep progressing with our style, with our program and with softball in general.”
Patty has consistently advocated for more favorable start times for players in tournaments such as the Women’s College World Series, and has helped deliver more exposure for the sport.
The now third-winningest coach in NCAA softball history, with 1,460 total wins and counting, to pair with seven national championships, stands as a pillar of the sport, and will soon be immortalized with a statue honoring her devotion and success to the program outside the 4,200 capacity Love’s Field — yet another hallmark of all she’s been able to accomplish.
For JT, life and softball were intertwined, and as he watched his mother change the sport, it became a part of who he was and what he was called to do.
“You’re fighting for what you believe in, fighting for what’s right," JT said. "Her strong-willed, always-fighting (demeanor), that was instilled in us at a very young age."
Although many father-son coaching duos have graced the sidelines of sports, JT and Patty’s relationship on and off the field was unique. As JT watched his mother, and as he studied her coaching styles, it was respect that ultimately built the Gasso family and the OU coaching dynasty.
“I've always thought she was the best coach in the game,” JT said. “... When I got to OU, I think a lot of people would expect it to be (a dynamic) where now I take a backseat. She really counted on me for input and she just said, ‘Alright, we're going to run the offense where you're going to teach them, we're gonna make it work, we're gonna mesh together.’"
A potentially awkward dynamic where Patty calls the shots over her son never materialized, and the opposite rang true from the beginning of JT’s OU tenure.
Patty saw the effect JT had on Michigan State’s hitters, elevating them from a .217 batting average and 20 home runs in 2014, the year prior to his arrival, to a .277 team average and 38 home runs during his lone season with the Spartans.
She trusted him to install the offense in the way they both wanted.
“I was raised around the OU softball style, where you want to be able to do more than one thing.” JT said. “And so I think from day one, we've always been on the same page about what we want hitters to do, what we want an offense to do, what the objective is and how we make it fit into the culture.”
Redshirt senior infielder Grace Lyons, assistant coach JT Gasso and senior utility player Alynah Torres during the WCWS against Tennessee on June 3.
‘Always so supportive and always there for you’
A feeling of humility hit JT when he was invited to participate in a workout at Eastern Oklahoma State as a high schooler.
Prior to that moment, his life revolved around his high school baseball bubble.
Then the bubble popped.
At the workout, he learned EOSC presented a caliber of play above his capabilities. Fortunately, his ties to then-head coach Aric Thomas, who played baseball for the Sooners in 1994 and 1995 and spent time later in various roles with the team, landed him an offer to join the team anyway.
Thomas’ offer came with one condition:
“If you come up here, you will learn what it takes to play college baseball.”
JT’s time at EOSC wasn’t centered around earning playing time — he had accepted his fate as a bench player — it was about something he would eventually apply to his time at OU.
“The mentality that I took was hard work, and the nonstop pursuit of trying to learn,” JT said. “I would try to latch on to the best players and just see, ‘Hey, what makes you so good?’ And a lot of times, it was not this big secret, it was how they approached the game and how they worked. I got to take a lot of great things from my time there, but a lot of things have nothing to do with baseball.”
Despite a common belief, it wasn’t Patty who taught JT how to coach, but instead, it was Thomas.
“He took me under his wing and said, ‘If you want to learn how to coach, you’re going to learn how to do it here,” Gasso said while speaking at EOSC after being named an EOSC Alumni Association’s Hall of Fame 2023 inductee, according to the McAlester News-Capital. “And in coaching, you learn it’s more about the relationships than it is the X’s and O’s.”
That isn’t to say the X’s and O’s aren’t important. On his journey to becoming a student of the game, JT would study baseball greats’ swings such as Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron.
Just as Bonds and Aaron discovered their individual styles of play, JT understood that there is no wrong or right way to swing a bat.
“In sports, why do we think that there is only one way to do things?,” JT said. “I know there are some constants that help you move faster or swing the bat faster, but the way that people do things is different. So if you're not aware of some uniqueness of different people, you may be telling someone to do something that they physically can't do.”
It’s one of the things he’s carried over to Norman and one of the primary reasons senior infielder Tiare Jennings admires his coaching style.
“He doesn’t try to make each hitter the same as each other,” Jennings said in episode three of OU’s Championship Mindset series. “He works with your skills, your strengths, your weaknesses. He always tries to be there for you, and he always knows what’s going on in my mind when I’m hitting.”
JT learned how to tell what his hitters are thinking as they’re hitting through putting relationships first, the hallmark of his tenure at Oklahoma and another thing he picked up from his time at EOSC.
His ability to prioritize his connection with his players is evident when they’re greeted at graduation with a personalized, hand-written card from the hitting coach summing up their journey at OU, and highlighting his own relationship with each player.
Because that is just the JT Gasso way.
He’ll let players be themselves, be there to support them and form strong connections with them, but also be a goofy and lighthearted soul on a success-ridden and devoted team.
“Obviously, he was a coach and we respected him immensely, but he also had that goofy older brother vibe,” former OU softball player Nicole Mendes said. “You always knew if you needed to be cheered up or you wanted to get roasted, JT was the one to go to. He was always so supportive and always there for you. ...
“I think he’s such a softy, but he’s just an amazing person.”
Assistant coach JT Gasso and redshirt senior utility Taylon Snow during the game against Oklahoma State on May 7, 2022.
‘It’s weird to think of an OU softball program without coach Gasso’
When Mendes first met JT during a high school visit in 2013, her mind didn’t automatically label him as a ‘hitting guru.’
However, she would eventually find out how wrong she was.
“He had the baseball flow going on, and I was like, ‘Who is this goofy guy?’” Mendes said. “... The flow is gone, but he’s still, even now, the goofy guy.”
Mendes can still hear JT’s voice telling her to breathe as the hitting coach stood outside the cold tub and watched as freezing cold water rose to her neck.
The drill was centered around breathing meditation and was meant to emphasize how heart rate affects a hitter’s swing and evaluation of balls and strikes. It was just one of the many peculiar drills JT had conducted with Mendes and other OU players.
He would also have them say things out loud while taking batting practice, timing their speech with their swing. The drills are formed from JT’s extensive research of the science of hitting and his constant desire to find new ways to improve OU’s already-dominant offense.
Although the drills are unorthodox, they work, and JT has been an integral part of building hitters like NCAA all-time home run leader Jocelyn Alo, 2019 Big 12 Player of the Year Sydney Romero and more.
“He's always pushing to learn more, understand and discover, and he really loves the science side of hitting,” Mendes said. “So, you combine all that and you get a coach who allows you to try new things and experiment with your swing and come up with crazy new drills. … You’re never in a box with him.”
As crazy as the drills may be, the success they generate can’t be argued.
In the 10 seasons prior to his arrival as an assistant, the Sooners finished top five in batting average twice. In his seven seasons as hitting coach, barring the shortened 2020 season due to COVID-19, OU has done so five times, including four consecutive seasons atop the nation.
Oklahoma has also finished top 3 in scoring each of the past five seasons, and is looking to continue the streak after beginning the 2024 campaign with 31 runs in four games. JT will lose four of the Sooners’ best hitters after the 2024 season — Kinzie Hansen, Jayda Coleman, Jennings and Alyssa Brito.
He will have plenty to look forward to, however, including freshmen Kasidi Pickering, who leads the Sooners in batting average and RBIs after their opening weekend, and Ella Parker, Extra Innings Softball’s No. 3 recruit in the class of 2023.
Despite OU’s rosters looking certain and solid for years to come, questions about Patty’s future with the program have started to gain traction after Patty’s comments after the Sooners 2023 WCWS victory added to the already ongoing speculation of her retirement.
“The expectation is overwhelming, the pressure is overwhelming,” Gasso said following the Sooners’ 2023 title win. “...I know what they’re feeling. I know what I’m feeling. It’s very difficult. It’s extremely rewarding. Like, I just want to go to Costco and shop and no one care that I’m there.”
As Patty steps into her 30th season as OU’s head coach, JT’s promotion to associate head coach has certainly planted the possibility of him becoming Patty’s heir.
However, JT doesn’t have taking over the head coach title on his bucket list, or even long-term goals.
Instead, he’s spent eight seasons building college softball’s offensive powerhouse, and the only thing looming on his mind is extending it to nine.
“When you start talking about the end and start talking about what that looks like, it doesn't make sense to talk about it because you're talking about something that isn’t even here yet,” JT said. “We’re present. We're focusing on having a good practice today, so we can be ready for our season. That's where we're at right now.”
As for Mendes, her answer to whether she can see JT becoming a head coach was much more clear.
“Oh yeah, absolutely,” Mendes said. “... It’s weird to think of an OU softball program without coach (Patty) Gasso, so hopefully it doesn’t happen too soon. But I could definitely see it.”
Regardless of if he steps into his mother’s shoes to lead the program she built, one thing is certain — the impact JT has left on the program, and the players that came through it, will last.
