'We were all sad, eating spaghetti': How NCAA softball came to change the WCWS format
Jenni CarlsonOklahoman
Last year's Oklahoma State softball team will always remember its last supper.
Unfortunately, it's for all the wrong reasons.
The memorable postgame meal came after OSU lost to Florida State and ended its season at the Women’s College World Series. That game finished at 2:18 a.m., and the Cowgirls didn’t get back to the team hotel to eat until after 4 a.m.
The meal: spaghetti.
“I’ve never eaten spaghetti at 4 o’clock in the morning,” OSU centerfield Chyenne Factor remembers thinking. “This wouldn’t be my meal of choice.”
Cowgirl third baseman Sydney Pennington recalls how surreal the scene was.
“We’re all just sitting in this hotel conference room eating spaghetti,” she said. “We’re like, ‘What are we doing?’
“We were all sad, eating spaghetti.”
Thankfully, no college softball team in the WCWS will ever have to endure another season-ending loss in the wee hours of the morning.
With the WCWS set to begin Thursday, the tournament will commence with a major overhaul to its schedule. The eight-day slate of games had been the same since 2005 when the NCAA moved from a winner-take-all championship game to a best-of-three championship series. But this year, a day has been added and the schedule has been revamped to give teams more rest days. It also provides flexibility if Oklahoma storms roll in and games need to be pushed back a day.
That part of the change is all because of OSU.
Call it the Cowgirl Clause.
“I wasn’t angry that we had to play,” OSU coach Kenny Gajewski said of the win-or-go-home game in last year's WCWS. “The truth is, the advantage was ours.”
Florida State had already played a must-win game earlier that day, so they were dealing with refueling and recovering.
OSU hadn’t played since the day before.
“My biggest heartache of this whole thing was when the game ended,” Gajewski said. “We go back to the hotel … college kids were actually going to bed. College kids don’t ever go to bed when the season is over.
“The travesty was not being able to have that quality time with your team that you’ll never have again. That was wrong.”
In truth, though, all of it was.
It was Saturday of the WCWS, which has long been the first knock-out day of the tournament. Four games are played, and the losers of all four are out of the double-elimination tournament.
The day session went off without a hitch, then OU and UCLA were set to play at 6 p.m. with OSU slated to play Florida State at 8:30 p.m., or about 30 minutes after the completion of the first game of the evening.
But before the evening session could start, rain rolled in. Everyone could see a delay was inevitable, but to hear the Cowgirls tell it, the revised plan went through several revisions.
“It kept getting pushed back,” Pennington said. “I mean, we were ready for like 9 o’clock. Then, it was like 10:30. Then, 11. It just kept getting pushed back, so it was just mentally hard and tiring.”
Gajewski said that was one of his biggest frustrations. Just because he wasn’t mad about playing doesn’t mean he wasn’t frustrated about other aspects of the situation.
“The irritation is a lack of communication,” he said.
OSU and Florida State finally started at 11:50 p.m.
“We were so tired,” Pennington said. “We were drinking energy drinks, and we shouldn’t have to do that to stay up. I think we were delirious at that point.”
Quick aside: no OSU player or coach ever said anything about the start time being part of why they lost. They say that they didn't play well enough to win that night/morning and that the Seminoles had to deal with the late start, too.
Still, it was so late overnight dew had started to form on the outfield grass. Factor recalls how wet it was after the rain earlier in the day, then the dew.
The stadium had largely cleared out by the time the game finished, save families and friends of the players and the coaches and a few hearty souls. The TV ratings, which broke all sorts of records last year, weren’t as high as they could’ve been either.
Neither team got the WCWS experience it deserved that night.
But the Cowgirls got the worst of it.
Gajewski remembers going to the postgame press conference but wishing he didn’t have to.
“And I always love to do that,” he said of talking to the media. “I always want to talk about our game, even after the last game, but I’m sitting there going, ‘My team is in a bus or in a locker room over here at 2:30 in the morning.’”
As bad as that was, nothing was worse than getting back to the hotel and no one having any energy to stay up and relish in the team’s final hours together.
“Not having that moment, that finality of that was probably the biggest travesty in the whole thing,” Gajewski said. “Nobody even talks about that.”
Factor said, “We really didn’t get to do anything. We went back (to Stillwater) the next day. Everyone went home. It wasn’t like, ‘We’re done.’ It was just, I don’t know … it was weird.
“A weird situation.”
Gajewski has more strident words for the whole thing.
“It was a disaster,” he said.
Gajewski was grateful OU coach Patty Gasso spoke out the next day against the WCWS having games that end so late. He even sent her a text thanking her for giving voice to the issue.
“If we’re about the welfare of the student-athlete – that is what is being preached to all of us – then do something,” Gasso said back then. “Do something.”
The NCAA did.
You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in college softball who is unhappy with the changes. But no one is any happier than the Cowgirls. If there's any silver lining in what happened, it's this: no other team will ever have a midnight start, a 2 a.m. finish or a sad spaghetti postgame meal.
“At least that’s not gonna happen again,” Pennington said.
But truth be told, it should’ve never happened in the first place. Not to the Cowgirls. Not to anyone.
