How Stillwater's Gage Gundy is preparing for career at next level — perhaps in two sports
Hallie HartOklahoman
STILLWATER — Tucker Barnard stepped out of the locker room and realized he wasn’t alone at Pioneer Stadium.
With the floodlights off, darkness obscured the field. As he left his office, the Stillwater High School football coach had no idea who was on the shadowy turf, but he heard noise and saw movement.
His mind drifted toward a troubling scenario.
Was someone vandalizing the stadium the night before the season opener?
Then he spotted Gage Gundy’s truck.
With the faint blue glow of the press box’s “WE ARE PIONEERS” letters as their sole guiding light, the senior quarterback and four teammates had been running routes. They were “imaginizing” their upcoming game against Arkansas powerhouse Greenwood, one of the kids told Barnard.
When the coach shared this mystery-turned-comedy story with Mike and Kristen Gundy, they were amused but not surprised. They had watched their youngest son naturally develop this spontaneous, charismatic leadership, the quality that led him to hold an impromptu post-midnight practice and persuade an entourage of peers to follow.
As the Pioneers prepare for their highly anticipated District 6A-II-1 matchup at Booker T. Washington on Friday, Barnard sees it, too.
“When he walks into the football locker room, the environment changes,” Barnard said. “When he walks into the baseball locker room or walks onto the baseball field, I don’t coach out there, but I guarantee you the environment changes. He has that kind of effect on his team.”
Gundy is a tone-setter, someone who can convince others to believe in the magic of improbable victories and last-second comebacks because he creates it.
That quality is opening the door to an array of options – perhaps in more than one sport.
Let’s get this out of the way: Gage Gundy is not an Oklahoma State commit.
Yes, his last name is synonymous with Cowboy football. His father is in his 18th season coaching OSU, and middle brother, Gunnar, is the emerging walk-on quarterback who backs up Spencer Sanders.
But Gage, the shaggy-haired teenager Kristen describes as her free-spirited “’70’s child,” has never been a follower. If anyone in the family willingly packed up and moved far away, she said, it would be the adventurous, adaptable youngest Gundy.
Northern Iowa, Houston Baptist, Pittsburg State and Georgia Southern have shown interest in his football skills. Penn State, Tennessee and Clemson have reached out about baseball. He’s also had conversations with MLB scouts.
“I have options open for anything,” Gundy said. “Just playing one individual sport somewhere, or doing both somewhere, or just any of that. All options are open for that.”
It’s easy to see why Gundy would appeal to recruiters in either sport.
At 6-foot-4, he stands above his father and brothers. He can use his arm to deliver a deep touchdown pass to a receiver or fire a baseball from first base to home plate for a quick out. He posted a .453 batting average with 14 home runs as a junior first baseman and now, only four games into his senior football season, has thrown for 737 yards and rushed for 137.
The measurables aren’t all that matter. Gundy’s coolly confident attitude allowed him to emerge as a leader on Stillwater’s baseball team alongside the No. 1 pick in the 2022 MLB Draft.
It also makes him a driving force behind the success of a Pioneer football team many have tabbed as a state title contender.
“Gage is just one of those kids, he just has ‘it,’ you know?” said Derek Rasmussen, Gundy’s 7-on-7 football coach who trained him in the summer. “That ‘it’ factor.”
His family understands.
Focused mindset
The high school senior bursts through the door in a flurry of energy, motion and constant conversation.Kristen Gundy knows Gage is home.
He tosses his backpack aside, taking little time to breathe before jetting to his next destination or activity. If he isn’t on the phone with a friend, then he might be relaying a story to his parents, zooming along at speeds usually only seen on racetracks.
“It’s almost just entertaining, if anything, to sit back and just watch him in motion at home,” Kristen said. “There’s always a plan.”
This is the personality Kristen has known and loved since Gage’s elementary days, when he decided to go against his brothers’ trend of short, spiky haircuts and grow his hair out – before his father had the famous mullet.
In his early years, the rough-and-tumble Gage played sports, but he preferred scampering around the ponds on his family’s land over running on a football field. Although he maintains his hobbies of fishing and hunting, his priorities have expanded.
If he wanted to be an effective starting quarterback, it had to happen.
Gundy played a variety of positions in youth football, not stepping into the starting signal-caller role until his junior year of high school.
That was when Mike noticed Gage exhibiting the traits he needed to motivate a team.
He organized weightlifting sessions. He dissected film with his father. He studied the habits of other quarterbacks, including Gunnar.
When Mike observed this phenomenon, he offered some wisdom.
“If there’s adversity, you can’t back off,” he said. “I said, ‘Leadership is a 24/7/365 job,’ and I told him, ‘If you’re gonna do this, these guys will follow you. But if you’re not willing to do it all the time, don’t do it.’”
With composure in high-stakes situations, Gage Gundy has established himself as this steady, calming yet inspiring presence for his football team.
It might be an innate tendency, but he refined it through baseball.
Gundy doesn’t remember all of the details. He was anywhere from 9 to 11 years old, he said, when he was competing against an elite Georgia travel team in Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Maybe it was a walk-off. Perhaps it was just a late home run. But Gundy made contact with the pitch and crushed it to give his team the narrow advantage it needed.
Although the memories are fuzzy, the lessons are clear. He realized he could thrive – wanted to thrive – in those pressure-packed moments. As Gundy competed in different ballparks, he grew to understand one of the toughest parts of the game: mental management.
“It’s such a slower sport than football,” Gundy said. “Football, if you make a mistake, the next play you can make something happen within 20 seconds. Baseball’s super slow, then you’re playing like a Monday, Tuesday game, you have to wait all the way until tomorrow. You wake up still kind of mad thinking about your game from yesterday.
“So I would say it’s definitely a big mind game, and you have to be able to keep confidence.”
When he figured out how to make that happen on the diamond, he had no problem translating that approach to the gridiron. The next step was improving his technique.
