Photo: OU Athletics

Oklahoma Opens Love’s Field By Avoiding Historic Upset

It was no surprise that an All-American christened Love’s Field with a home run in the first inning of the first game ever played in the $48 million crown jewel of a ballpark. 

It was a bit of a surprise that it wasn’t any of Patty Gasso’s legion of stars, but instead Miami’s wonderfully dynamic All-American Karli Spaid who took Nicole May deep into the Oklahoma afternoon. 

It wouldn’t be the last surprise. Or the biggest. It wouldn’t even be Spaid’s last home run. 

Thanks to Kinzie Hansen, again, No. 1 Oklahoma’s 68-game winning streak is intact. But the three-time defending champions had to work for a one-game winning streak at Love’s Field. Hansen’s walk-off two-run home run, after Miami homered its way back from a four-run deficit in the top of the seventh inning, was the difference in Oklahoma’s 9-7 wild win. 

The hero of Oklahoma’s last win at Marita Hynes FIeld etched her name in Love’s Field lore.

At stake was a winning streak dating back to Feb. 19, 2023, when the Sooners lost at Baylor, and a 65-game home winning streak (now 66), that goes back almost exactly four years, to a Leap Day loss against North Texas at Marita Hynes Field in 2020. 

Oklahoma hadn’t even practiced in its new home prior to the game—according to OU athletic director Joe Castiglione, the stadium was still receiving finishing touches as late as Friday morning (also part of the weekend tournament, Liberty and Tulsa played at Marita Hynes Field prior to the game at Love’s Field). The stadium looked gorgeous on television, every bit the standard setter it was hyped to be. But from untended land around the ballpark visible in aerial shots to the practice schedule, the proceedings felt slightly rushed. 

So often comfortable in the spotlight they’ve created for themselves through their success, the Sooners, perhaps correspondingly, looked oddly discombobulated at the outset. May’s typically impeccable control wavered. She walked leadoff batter Allie Cummins and missed her spots on back-to-back home runs by Spaid and Holly Blaska. The Sooners hadn’t given up more than three runs in a game all season. Friday, they were down three before they even got to bat. 

They rallied, first in drips and drops and then like an Oklahoma downpour. By the fifth inning, Alyssa Brito’s solo home run tied the game 3-3 and finally chased resilient Miami starter Addy Jarvis (temporarily, as it turned out). In the sixth inning, they gave the capacity crowd of more than 4,000 what they came for. Riley Ludlam’s pinch hit single broke the tie and back-to-back home runs from Jayda Coleman and Kasidi Pickering left the dugout and crowd delirious. 

At that point, Miami’s strong start looked destined to be just a footnote in Love’s Field history. 

Instead, the Redhawks very nearly made history. After Chloe Parks led off the top of the seventh with a single off Karlie Keeney, Cummins, Jenna Golembiwski and Karli Spaid went back-to-back-to-back to tie the game 7-7—Golembiewski’s moon shoot leaving the stadium. 

After one game, we have a pretty good measure of the noise at Love’s. Because if it will rarely get much louder than after Coleman and Pickering’s home runs in the sixth, it will never get any quieter than after Spaid’s second home run of the day erased the seemingly safe lead. 

Miami got a runner to second against Oklahoma reliever SJ Guerin, but couldn’t quite find the go-ahead run. Even on this day, when nothing felt normal and Miami played with such confidence, that felt like too much of a door left open for the Sooners. 

Jarvis returned to the circle for the bottom of the seventh, and after Rylie Boone led off with a single, Hansen delivered the walk-off blast. 

It’s tough to elbow your way into record books crowded with the likes of Jocelyn Alo, Lauren Chamberlain and Keilani Ricketts. But by hitting the game-tying, two-strike, two-out, seventh-inning home run in Oklahoma’s final game at Marita Hynes Field and the winner in its first game at Love’s Field, Hansen will be even more difficult to dislodge from her perch than any those other stars. 

Spare a thought for the visitors. For months, sitting there all alone on the schedule, Miami probably struck some as little more than a prop. Oklahoma couldn’t very well play the first game in its new stadium without an opponent. They were anything but the equivalent of homecoming fodder.

A year ago, needing games during a Big 12 bye, Oklahoma traveled to Oxford, Ohio, to play an April mini-tournament. They rolled into town as the biggest show in softball, fans standing in line for unclaimed tickets at a venue that normally doesn’t charge admission. And they rolled over a very good Miami team, maybe not quite as comfortably as the 13-1 run-rule score suggested, but, you know, pretty comfortably. That day, Miami played as if even it wasn’t sure it belonged on the field. That certainly wasn’t the case Friday. Perhaps because they saw their own home game against Oklahoma morph into a spectacle—a joyous spectacle with a festival atmosphere, but a spectacle all the same—they were at ease here.

The home runs helped. They usually do. A year ago, only Oklahoma finished the season with a better slugging percentage than Miami. Only four teams, including the Sooners, hit more home runs per game. Most of those hitters returned for head coach Kirin Kumar, on whose watch the program has become one of the most consistently prolific in Division I—in addition to 2023, Miami ranked second nationally in slugging in 2021 and eighth in 2022. All of that for a program that barely cracked the top 100 in slugging the year before Kumar arrived. These days, Spaid is a deserving All-American, Golembiewski and Cummins are right there with her.

That’s the world Oklahoma helped create, just as much as one in which an edifice like Love’s FIeld is possible, one in which a softball landscape scrambling to match OU’s standard produces a Miami.

Friday, it wasn’t quite enough to make history. But no one in Norman is going to forget the opener—or the Redhawks—anytime soon.

• During an in-game interview, Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said work was still being done to finish the stadium this morning—apparently including installing the final seats. 
• Castiglione also suggested they are still considering ways to expand seated capacity in the future beyond the current 4,200. 
• Also during the broadcast, Nicole Mendes and Erin Miller called out another new feature, at least by Oklahoma standards: walk-up songs. Apparently, Patty Gasso dangled them as a carrot at Marita Hynes Field, but only if players met near-impossible academic goals.