Mike White shares key to Texas beating Oklahoma in Game 1 of WCWS

Texas softball has had a magical season to this point, but the top-seeded Longhorns have a relatively young team. That makes the task of going up against an Oklahoma program that has won three straight national titles all the more difficult.

Texas head coach Mike White spoke with ESPN before Game 1 of the Women’s College World Series final about the key to his team coming out on top.

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According to White, the Longhorns have to play loose.

“I’ve tried not to overplay it,” Mike White said. “They’ve got to compete, play calm, play cool, play collected. Just play it like any other game. I know it’s easy to say and hard to do, but we’ll find out how their nerves are in the first couple of innings.”

Texas has one of the best pitchers in the country on the mound in Teagan Kavan. The freshman enters Wednesday’s WCWS final having yet to allow a run in the Women’s College World Series.

White also shared the key to Kavan and the rest of the Texas pitching staff continuing to have success.

“You’ve just got to hope you hit your spots and hit your locations and trust the pitch calling, that we get the right selection of pitches to go,” White said. “They aren’t perfect. They aren’t going to bat 1.000. So you’ve just got to kind of take your chances. If you walk them there’s plenty of people behind them and we cannot do that.”

Patty Gasso calls on Oklahoma to ‘play our game,’ not worry about ‘defending the crown’

As for the other team in the Women’s College World Series final, Sooners coach Patty Gasso told ESPN’s Holly Rowe “heavy is the head who wears the crown” ahead of Wednesday’s Women’s College World Series championship opener.

When it comes to pulling off the first-ever four-peat, Gasso said her team needs to stick to what it does best against Texas. She’s not worried about holding on to that “crown,” and the goal is for the Sooners to keep the high energy this week.

“The goal here is to just play free,” Gasso told Rowe ahead of first pitch against Texas Wednesday night. “You can’t think that way, we don’t have to ‘defend the crown.’ We have to play our game. We’ve got to work very hard today. The goal is to get the first game under your belt.

“We talked about non-negotiables, and energy is an absolute non-negotiable. You must be here, ready to play with all you have. Leave everything on the field.”