No. 2 Oklahoma overcomes early woes, downs No. 7 Tennessee on Ella Parker's walk-off homer in WCWS
Sooners ace Sam Landry had a feeling she couldn't quite put her finger on heading into No. 2 Oklahoma's first game against No. 7 Tennessee in the Women's College World Series.
'Something's gonna happen,' she remembered thinking.
But through most of the game, nothing did — for Oklahoma, at least. The Sooners were trailing 3-1 with two outs and runners on first and third in the bottom of the seventh staring down a Friday game in the loser's bracket. That was until sophomore Ella Parker hammered a walk-off home run, her second of the game, over Devon Park's center-field wall off Tennessee's star pitcher Karlyn Pickens.
Advertisement
'(I) just understand to keep passing the bat,' Parker said postgame. 'I wasn't trying to make any moment too big.'
Oklahoma won 4-3, earning an off day before playing No. 6 Texas on Saturday. Tennessee faces No. 3 Florida on Friday night in an elimination game.
'That was a gut punch,' Tennessee coach Karen Weekly said.
'We play Florida tomorrow. One team's going home. It's going to come down to which team can flush today the quickest.'
ELLA PARKER WALKS IT OFF ‼️#WCWS x 🎥 ESPN / @OU_Softball pic.twitter.com/Z9RZ8t1bxI
— NCAA Softball (@NCAASoftball) May 29, 2025
The game felt like Tennessee's for the taking until the top of the seventh when Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso saw fans starting to leave the stadium and said she shared that with the team.
'People thought we were done,' she said. 'One thing, if you watched us through the season, we're never done.'
Momentum started tilting out of Tennessee's favor in later innings as Oklahoma ramped up its defense, and fully shifted when Oklahoma turned a clutch double play with bases loaded to maintain the 3-1 deficit heading into its final turn at-bat. It was the Sooners' third double play of the game, and set the stage for their comeback.
'We work on double plays all the time so they're fun to turn in the game,' Landry said. 'They're definitely a momentum changer.'
The Sooners gave up three runs throughout the first three innings but held the Volunteers scoreless after that.
'(The Sooners) love, love defense so much that my shoulder, knee everything is falling apart because we just have to hit them ground balls constantly,' Gasso said. 'They're all great hitters but if you ask them what they like better they'll say defense. They believe, and I believe, defense wins championships.'
third DP of the day 🔄
Three outs to work with.
📺ESPN pic.twitter.com/dp2oxYwz6n
— Oklahoma Softball (@OU_Softball) May 29, 2025
Tennessee's Pickens retired two of the first three batters of the seventh inning. All game long, Pickens — who threw the fastest softball pitch in NCAA history last week with a 79.4 mile-per-hour flamer against Nebraska — was easily throwing 75 mph fastballs and the Sooners struggled at the plate for most of the game.
Advertisement
Gasso said to prepare for Pickens, the team set their pitching machines to nearly 80 mph in practice.
'You see the same thing out of Karlyn all seven innings. Karlyn is as steady as they come,' Weekly said. 'She's a warrior. Ninety nine times out of 100, she wins that game.'
On Pickens' second pitch to her fourth batter of the seventh, Oklahoma's Kasidi Pickering hit a single that pushed Ailana Agbayani to third base before Parker brought it home — literally.
Parker and Pickering lead the Sooners with a .418 and .409 batting average, respectively. They both rank second and third, respectively, on the team in RBIs.
Pickens struck out eight and allowed five hits on 129 pitches. Landry threw 139 pitches, tallied two strikeouts and allowed eight hits.
Oklahoma has yet to lose a game in this year's playoffs, escaping the regional round with three straight wins and then besting No. 15 Alabama in a straight set in the super regionals. Its pursuit of its fifth straight championship with its 14 newcomers now continues Saturday.
'Winning the first game sets you up. It's really, really important and I think this team doesn't even know that,' Gasso said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
33 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Hollywood High' Review: How Teens Took Over the Screen
Reality shapes the movies, and the movies reshape reality, which makes its way back into film. In the 1950s, for instance, widespread dismay, sensational media coverage and even congressional hearings revolved around the crisis of juvenile delinquency, which yielded a spate of what's-wrong-with-young-people features, many of them cheesy and laughable. Among the few that gained a hold on the public imagination was 'Rebel Without a Cause' (1955), a fairly terrible teen soap that became iconic because its point of view was sympathetic to its desperate youth and because its charismatic young lead, James Dean, had died in a car wreck less than a month before it was released. The car Dean's character drove, a Mercury, became the hot-rodders' 'vehicle of choice through most of the 1950s,' writes Bruce Handy in 'Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies.' A hoodlum in 'American Graffiti' (1973), another defining movie about youth, made a generation later, also drove a Mercury. That film takes place over a single night in 1962, and the choice of car was a joke on its driver, an illustration of a comical urge to cling to a faded past even among young people. 'Rock and roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,' the film's gearhead hero, John, observes; 1973 looked back to 1962, when everyone was sighing about 1959. Most of the songs on the celebrated soundtrack were already oldies on the night it takes place. The movie harbored a droll sensitivity for early-onset nostalgia. Mr. Handy's teen-mag title and his book's colorful packaging belie the author's seriousness about his subject. A veteran magazine journalist whose credits include a stint at Vanity Fair, he writes with the lively appreciation of a fan rather than with condescension or academic pedantry, combining astute cultural analysis with fascinating trivia.
The Verge
33 minutes ago
- The Verge
The Access-Ability Summer Showcase returns with the latest in accessible games
Now in its third year, the Access-Ability Summer Showcase is back to redress the lack of meaningful accessibility information across the ongoing video game showcase season. As we see progress broadly slow down, it's also a timely reminder of the good work that's still happening in pursuit of greater accessibility in gaming. 'At a time where we are seeing a slowdown in accessibility adoption in the AAA games space,' organizer Laura Kate Dale says, 'we're showing that there are interesting accessible games being made, games with unique and interesting features, and that being accessible is something that can bring an additional audience to purchase and play your games.' The showcase is growing, too. In 2025, it's longer, more packed with games, and streamed concurrently on Twitch, Youtube (where it's also available on-demand), and on Steam's front page. That growth comes with its own challenges — mitigated this year by Many Cats Studio stepping in as sponsor — but the AA Summer Showcase provides an accessible platform in response to the eye-watering costs of showcasing elsewhere (it has previously been reported that presenting trailers across Summer Game Fest starts at $250,000), while providing disabled viewers with the information they need to know if they can actually get excited about new and upcoming releases. It's lesson Dale hopes other platforms might take on board. 'I grow the show in the hopes that other showcases copy what we're doing and make this the norm,' she says. 'If I could quit hosting the AA Summer Showcase next year because every other show in June committed to talking about accessibility as part of their announcements, that would be wonderful news.' To help that along (sorry, Laura, don't quit just yet), The Verge has collated the games featured in this year's Access-Ability Summer Showcase below. Visual accessibility in focus A major theme that emerged from this year's showcase is color blind considerations. The showcase kicked off with ChromaGun2: Dye Hard by Pixel Maniacs, a first-person color-based puzzler. In its color blind mode, colors are paired with symbols for better parsing and those symbols combine when colors are mixed. A similar spirit is echoed in Sword and Quill's Soulblaze, a creature-collecting roguelike that's a bit of Pokémon mixed with tabletop RPGs (dice included). It also pairs colors and icons, adding a high level of customization to color indicators, difficulty, and an extensive text-to-speech function that supports native text-to-speech systems and NVDA. Later, Gales of Nayeli from Blindcoco Studios, a grid-based strategy RPG, showcased its own color blind considerations and an impressive array of visual customization options. Room to breathe A welcome trend carried over from last year, games continue to eschew time pressure and fail states. Dire Kittens Games' Heartspell: Horizon Academy is a puzzle dating simulator that feels like Bejeweled meets Hatoful Boyfriend. Perhaps its most welcome feature is the ability to skip puzzles altogether, though it also features customization for puzzle difficulty. Sunlight from Krillbite Studio is a chill hiking adventure that tasks the player with picking flowers while walking through a serene forest. It does away with navigation as you'll always be heading the right way, while sound cues direct you to nearby flowers. This year's showcase featured two titles from DarZal Games. Quest Giver is a low-stakes management visual novel which casts the player as an NPC handing quests out to RPG heroes, while 6-Sided Stories is a puzzle game involving flipping tiles to reveal an image. The games were presented by Darzington, a developer with chronic hand pain who develops with those needs in mind and, interestingly, with their voice (thanks to Talon Voice). Both games feature no time pressure, no input holds or combos, and allow for one-handed play. Single-handed controls are also a highlight of Crayonix Games' Rollick N' Roll, a puzzle game in which you control the level itself to get toy cars to their goal without the burden of a ticking clock. Highlighting highlights Speaking of highlights, this was another interesting trend to emerge from this year's showcase. Spray Paint Simulator by Whitethorn Games is, in essence, PowerWash Simulator in reverse. Among a suite of accessibility features that help players chill out and paint everything from walls and bridges to what looks like Iron Man's foot, the game allows you to highlight painting tasks and grants a significant level of control over how those highlights appear and how long they last. Whitethorn Games provides accessibility information for all its games here. Cairn, by contrast, is a challenging climbing game from The Game Bakers which looks like transplanting Octodad onto El Capitan. As it encourages players to find new routes up its mountains, the game allows players to highlight their character's limbs, as well as skip quick reaction minigames and rewind falls completely. Highlights are also important to Half Sunk Games' Blow-up: Avenge Humanity, in which players can desaturate the background and customize the size and tone of enemy outlines to make its chaotic gunplay more visible. Something Qudical's Coming Home, which debuted during the showcase, also offers in its tense horror gameplay as you evade a group of murderers. You can switch on a high-contrast mode that highlights objects to distinguish them from the environment (including said killers). Unsighted If this year's been challenging for accessibility, it's been even more disappointing for blind players when it comes to games that are playable independently. The AA Summer Showcase, however, included an interlude showing off the best titles from the recent Games for Blind Gamers 4, a game jam in which all games are designed with unsighted play in mind and judged by blind players. Four games were featured: Lacus Opportunitas by one of last year's standouts shiftBacktick, The Unseen Awakening, Barista, and Necromancer Nonsense. This was chased by a look at Tempo Labs Games' Bits & Bops, a collection of rhythm games with simple controls and designed to be playable in its entirety without sighted assistance. A difficult subject Accessible indie games often favor the cozy, but this year's AA Summer Showcase brought a standout game that bucked that trend. Wednesdays by ARTE France is a game that deals with the aftermath of childhood abuse. That's certainly in keeping with the host of trauma-driven indie games out there. Wednesdays, however, positions itself as a more hopeful examination of that trauma, both through its visual novel style memories and theme park manager gameplay. Like so many of the showcase's games this year, Wednesdays includes mitigations for color blindness — though no essential information is tied to color in-game — as well as a comprehensive text log for cognitive support, manual and automated text scrolling, and customization options for cursor speed, animations, fonts, inputs, and more. Better yet, all those options are displayed at launch and the game always opens in a windowed mode to allow for easier setup of external accessibility tools.
News24
37 minutes ago
- News24
MultiChoice warns of ‘unprecedented financial disruption' in trading update
Be among those who shape the future with knowledge. Uncover exclusive stories that captivate your mind and heart with our FREE 14-day subscription trial. Dive into a world of inspiration, learning, and empowerment. You can only trial once. Start your FREE trial now Show Comments ()
