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If you tuned in to the Oklahoma softball team’s 7-2 win over Texas on Saturday, you saw Jocelyn Alo put on quite a show. If you didn’t tune in … well, you only have a few more chances to see perhaps the greatest college athlete Hawaii has produced continue her assault on the record book, so plan accordingly.
On Saturday, the Campbell graduate had a hand in five of the defending champion Sooners’ seven runs as they improved to 2-0 in the double-elimination Women’s College World Series, going 2-for-3 with a two-run homer, three RBIs and three runs scored.
And if you saw Alo get those two hits Saturday, you saw her notch more hits than she did as a senior in the Sabres’ entire four-game state tournament run to the title.
That’s right, Alo had only one hit in the 2017 Datahouse/HHSAA Softball Championships. Did she “choke,” to invoke an overused sports term? No. Alo, Campbell’s catcher that season, had only one hit because opposing pitchers worked around her like she was Barry Bonds on … well, whatever Barry was on 20 years ago times 1,000.
Alo went 1-for-4 in the Sabres’ four tournament wins … with 13 walks — some of them outwardly intentional and the rest effectively intentional.
There’s some real irony in the fact that Hawaii sports fans have a better shot at seeing Alo hit a home run when she’s playing in the WCWS nearly 4,000 miles away at USA Softball Hall of Fame Stadium in Oklahoma City than we did during her senior year of high school.
The Sooners’ next game is at 6 a.m. today if you’re reading this early enough. They face UCLA with two chances to end the Bruins’ season. Win today and Oklahoma (56-2 entering today’s play) advances to the best-of-three championship series against one of the two Big 12 rivals that beat it this season — Oklahoma State or Texas. That series runs Wednesday through (if necessary) Friday. And the Sooners are favorites as they seek their second straight NCAA title (which could have been their third if COVID-19 had not canceled the 2020 WCWS.
Alo is a fifth-year senior, so she has two to five games left, and I think people are actually underestimating her greatness. What Hawaii-produced player in any sport has accomplished as much as she has?
Marcus Mariota? Sure, he won the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award in college athletics, mostly because football is by far the most popular sport. But that’s a single-season honor. Alo is now a two-time national player of the year, and she has shattered the career home run record. Her 118 (and counting) have put previous record-holder Lauren Chamberlain 23 blasts behind her, not even visible in her rearview mirror.
If you want to talk about career numbers, Timmy Chang deserves mention. But his gaudy passing stats are partly a function of the run ’n’ shoot offense.
The closest to Alo’s level of dominance might be legendary UH pitcher Derek Tatsuno. The 234 strikeouts he tallied in 1979 are still a Division I record, and he owns a share of the single-season wins mark as well with 20. But Alo’s career accomplishments clearly outpace even Tats’.
It’ll be exciting to see what Alo can accomplish after college, but for now don’t miss the few chances you have to see her do the things she does better than perhaps anyone in the college game’s history.
Need a little extra incentive to root Alo on today? As I mentioned earlier, Oklahoma has a chance today to end UCLA’s season. If you’re a fan of University of Hawaii softball going back to the mid-’90s, the Bruins might bring up some not-so-fond memories.
The 1994 Rainbow Wahine softball team fell one win short of the program’s first trip to the Women’s College World Series, losing two extra-inning games to Missouri on the last day of the Lawrence, Kan., regional when just one win was needed.
A year later, UH was back in a regional in Columbia, S.C., but fell short on the final day of the regional against a UCLA team that would go on to win the national championship, led by Australian pitcher Tanya Harding, who was named the WCWS Most Outstanding Player.
Harding went back Down Under pretty much as soon as the season was done — she enrolled at UCLA only for one trimester, and left without taking final exams. Two years later, the Bruins were stripped of their title over scholarship issues, confirming UH fans’ suspicions that their team had been cheated out of a World Series trip.
UCLA is not Hawaii’s softball rival — the Pac-12 is on a different level than the Big West — but Alo could still get some sweet revenge for Hawaii softball fans today.
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