Patty Gasso explains why she missed OU game, 'Ben Ready' up to the task

OU softball head coach Patty Gasso couldn’t remember the last time she had missed a Sooners game. She kept thinking and thinking but nothing immediately came to mind.

The weather played with the Okana Invitational all weekend at Love’s Field. Not only did it cancel the Saturday game between OU and UCF, it moved up OU’s game vs. St. Thomas from Friday to Thursday.

That move led to Gasso missing the game. She already had a previous engagement scheduled for Thursday at Oklahoma Christian University.

And that domino had her son, JT Gasso, take over for one night. One night only… for now. But JT? He is ‘Ben Ready’ and was, indeed, ready to go.

“All right, so I think you’ve heard this already, but JT has named himself ‘Ben Ready’. And so he makes sure that I know that Ben Ready is ready because he’s Ben Ready,” Gasso told SoonerScoop on Friday. “I really had to, I could not, this Oklahoma Christian University has this big gala, and I was a keynote speaker, and I could not, I mean, there was 500 or more people there in evening gowns. I mean, it’s another level of responsibility for me.

“And I talked to Toby (Baldwin), I think he might have let Joe (Castiglione) know, JT and Jen Rocha are quite ready. Tiare (Jennings) can get it done. So I had to trust that. But when I was at the banquet, they’re like, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’m like, I’m here for you. And they would yell out the score in the middle of my speech and things like that. So it was quite different. 

“But I just, I love that university. I love what they stand for. They have a lot of prestigious alums. Sherri Coale was there, and that was, she is a phenomenal speaker. So I’m like, ‘oh, please, why are you here?’ Because now I got to ramp it up a little more. But there are prestigious people in that audience. And I just felt I absolutely had to do that. And I felt very confident in our players and in our coaches that they could get the job done.”

An odd occurrence, for sure, but the Sooners did just fine. OU took out St. Thomas 12-4 in five innings. Cydney Sanders hit two home runs in the same inning to highlight an eight-run bottom of the second.

So when Patty needed a recap of what was what, you know Ben Ready was more than willing to let her know.

“Ben Ready gave me a breakdown of the game and talked about how great the players were without me,” Gasso said. “And with Ben Ready, how fun it was, and wonderful, and he was so ‘Yeah,’ and everyone’s like, ‘Hey.’ Oh God. When we go into the locker room, Ben Ready turns on music and I come in and it’s some kind of music that I like from my past so I get everybody up to kind of dance around a little bit.

“Well, he walked in and they turned on, what is it called?”Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggity dog.’ So they were all dancing like characters and they got him to dance. It was like his prom night.”

OU closes the weekend at 34-3 overall and 9-3 in the SEC. The Sooners play their final midweek game of the season Wednesday with Bedlam at Devon Park in Oklahoma City against Oklahoma State. Then it’s back to the SEC grind with a three-game set at Alabama next weekend.