OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — When the Oklahoma baseball program brings in new players, coach Skip Johnson gives them a daily exercise to make sure they are cut out for the type of program he runs.
“We make them make their beds and they send me pictures of beds being made,” he said. “It’s stuff like that, we’re just trying to get those guys to be attentive and detailed of what we try to do.”
That's not to suggest the daily bed-making initiation is what led to the Sooners
winning their first national championship since 1994, but it does hint at the stick-to-itiveness Johnson demands from his players. They demonstrated it during a late-season slump that, once broken, turned into a title run no one outside the team could have foreseen.
“We spend a lot of time trying to find out their character from the place they were at or their high school coach or their junior college coach,” Johnson said. “We watch them. We do all those things. We bring them in and we ask them questions, and in some places some guys are not the right fit.”
OU played its best by far at the end, punctuating its championship Monday with a 13-2 win over North Carolina in a three-game College World Series final.
In six games in Omaha, the Sooners batted .307 and averaged eight runs and two homers per game. That's the third-highest batting average and most runs and homers per game by a champion since the CWS moved to Charles Schwab Field in 2011.
CWS most outstanding player Jaxon Willits batted .500 and drove in seven runs. Jason Walk and Dasan Harris each hit two homers in an 11-4 win over Georgia after coming into the game with four apiece. Deiten Lachance homered three times in the series and 18 times in the last 34 games.
“I think we knew that the talent was always in the room, and that’s something that Skip and all the coaches preached to us from day one in the fall, is that this group of guys is special,” Willits said. “Whether we were playing well or not, we believed that we had the talent in the room to go out and win a national championship.”
Johnson, one of the most successful junior college coaches in the 1990s and early 2000s at Navarro College in Texas, leaned on what he knows when building the team. Five everyday position players were high school recruits and three were from junior colleges. Third baseman Camden Johnson was the only transfer from a four-year school (Wichita State).
All three starting pitchers were freshmen and recruited from high schools. LJ Mercurius (UNLV) and three other relievers came from the portal.
“I think the biggest thing I’ve seen in my three years of college so far, is teams have two choices,” said Mercurius, who allowed just two runs in 12 2/3 innings and got the win in Game 3. “It’s either you kind of split apart when things aren’t going well, or you come together when things aren’t going well. When we were losing games, we were still in the locker room, having fun, cracking jokes and just pulling for each other.”
Johnson said the gantlet that is the Southeastern Conference schedule prepared the Sooners for the national tournament. They were picked 14th in the preseason poll, lost six of their nine conference series and finished 11th with losses in seven of nine games entering regionals.
The Sooners became the seventh straight SEC team to win the national title.
“It’s the best conference in the country, and it molded us,” Johnson said. “It was a super regional every weekend. And those guys continued to grind it out and pick each other up. And it shows you what kind of character they have when they became selfless. That was what’s really special.”
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