New softball stadiums are needed at OU, Oklahoma State. Here's why they're deserved
Jenni CarlsonOklahoman
Marita Hynes’ eyes twinkled as she gazed around the stadium that bears her name.
Crimson-clad softball fans poured in, filling seats and packing bleachers. Every available space was occupied. Had there been more room, it might well have been filled, too — another thousand fans or so came to Marita Hynes Field for the super regional just to sit beyond the outfield wall and watch the game on a big screen.
Sitting behind home plate amid the hustle and the bustle, Hynes raised an eyebrow and lowered her voice.
“What idiot built this lil’ ol’ dinky place?” she cracked.
There was no idiot.
Hynes was the force behind the building of OU's softball stadium in 1998. As the senior women’s administrator at the time, she spearheaded the fundraising for a 1,400-seat complex that was top of the line.
But now, the Sooners deserve better. Bigger, too.
Ditto for the Cowgirls.
As the Women’s College World Series wraps up play, this past week has been a reminder of the love affair our state has with college softball. Thousands packed Hall of Fame Stadium, and many who weren’t there wanted to be. We talked about softball. We wrote about softball. You read about it by the tens of thousands.
Even though there are lots of reasons for our fastpitch passion, OU and OSU are a significant part of the equation. They have won many hearts, and for good reason.
They are darn good.
The Sooners and the Cowgirls are among the best programs in the country, and frankly, they deserve facilities that are among the best.
Instead, their facilities aren’t even the best in the Big 12.
“We are at the bottom in this conference, maybe in the bottom couple of schools,” OSU coach Kenny Gajewski said earlier this season of what the Cowgirls have. “It’s not like we don’t have anything nice here. We’ve got a lot of nice things.”
But Gajewski, who just finished his sixth season in Stillwater, has had lengthy conversations with retiring athletic director Mike Holder and incoming athletic director Chad Weiberg about building a new stadium. It would replace Cowgirl Stadium, a 700-seat facility that opened in 2000.
“We don’t want to add on,” Gajewski said. “We want to start over. We need to.”
The hope is the Cowgirls can stay on the corner of Duck Street and McElroy Road. With Allie P. Reynolds Stadium no longer being used, the land just south of Cowgirl Stadium could be the perfect spot for a new home of OSU softball.
Building there would also allow the Cowgirls to continue playing on their current field during construction of their new one.
But at this point, OSU doesn’t even have any artist renderings or architectural details.
“You can’t really sell a dream until you have drawings and pictures of what things may look like,” Gajewski said, adding he believes that will be done in the coming months.
Then, it will likely take two or three years and somewhere between $25 million and $30 million for the stadium to be built. But OSU has done some big projects in recent years. The Greenwood Tennis Center. Neal Patterson Stadium for soccer. O’Brate Stadium for baseball.
“I don’t need anything more than what O’Brate has,” Gajewski remembers telling Holder earlier this year. “I think we just need a smaller version of that.”
Gajewski wants to be clear — he appreciates everything that’s been done to make Cowgirl Stadium as good as possible. A generous donation has a new scoreboard in the works. The fan decks beyond the outfield wall have been a huge hit and given the stadium a unique flavor. The field looks spectacular despite terrible drainage.
But there are only so many stopgaps.
“We need more seats. We need more bathrooms, concessions, visitor locker rooms, umpire rooms. We need a bigger press box. We need a new field,” Gajewski said.
“It’s time.”
OU coach Patty Gasso would say it’s past time in Norman.
Plans to renovate Marita Hynes Field were revealed in May 2017, but not long after, Sooner brass had a change of mind. Why not use the money being raised to build an entirely new stadium for softball?
In June 2018, Oklahoma Board of Regents approved a proposal for that new facility. It would be 3,000 seats. It would have three concession stands, six restrooms and multiple facilities for the team to use. It would cost $22 million. It would sit on the northwest corner of South Jenkins Avenue and Imhoff Road, just south of the current stadium.
But three years later, that corner is still grass and trees.
Why?
“Money,” Gasso said bluntly earlier this season. “Money is the culprit.”
OU decided half of the cost of the stadium, now estimated at $25 million total, must be raised before ground is broken. The pandemic has slowed fundraising in college sports departments across the country, and OU is no different. But Gasso believes donations for the softball stadium have started flowing again as the Sooners became the talk of the softball world, soaring to No. 1 in the rankings and smashing a school-record number of homers.
OU even started a fundraising campaign this spring called Launch Pad, seeking per-home-run donations. With the Sooners passing the 150-homer mark earlier in the WCWS, that has added juice to the overall stadium fundraising campaign.
“I just feel like we’re getting closer,” Gasso said.
Still, the delay has been frustrating.
“It’s hard in many ways because … you have to give answers to your team,” Gasso said. “When I was recruiting these guys, I’m telling them that they’re (going to be) playing in a new stadium.”
Now, the Sooners will be lucky if this current group of freshmen plays in a new stadium before their eligibility is done, though at least one of them isn’t rankled by that possibility.
“I didn’t choose this school because of, ‘Oh, hey, we’re gonna have a new field,’” Sooner freshman pitcher Nicole May said. “I don’t really care about the flashy aspect of that.”
Would it be nice to have twice as many fans for home games and brand-new training facilities?
“I mean, that’d be great,” May said.
But …
“We’re here to win,” she said. “I don’t really care what field it’s on.”
