By Kent Lowe
Special to LSUsports.net
OKLAHOMA CITY — As I turned my rent car down Remington Place here Wednesday morning, I realized I remembered the area all too well from my past visits to this city.
On the left, was Remington Park race track, where I had visited many former co-workers who worked there in the early 1990s. On the right was the big zoo and the Kirkpatrick Center museum. In the distance off the interstate was the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Museum and there on the left, just past the barn area of Remington Park, was an area I had passed many times in driving to the race track, but never stopped.
This time the car took the left turn into the ASA Hall of Fame Stadium and for a brief moment I realized that just like Omaha and Rosenblatt Stadium, this was the mecca of college softball. The place every softball player dreamed of being on Memorial Day weekend. If they can sing of being “Back Home in Omaha” to talk about the College World Series, then certainly there is something to being “Finally in OKC” with the LSU softball team.
A lot has changed since Yvette Girouard brought the Lady Cajuns here a few years ago. But the game and dream is still the same. LSU has reached the end of the dream, or have they? Skip Bertman always talks about teams who are just happy to be here and spend their time worried about what souvenirs to bring home and how many tickets they need or how they will look on national television.
Well, is this LSU team happy to be here. You’d better believe it. Are they satisfied with what they’ve accomplished. Not really. Because they really do want more. Can they win it? Well, they are in it, aren’t they? Now there are teams in this eight team field that LSU is probably better than. There are also a couple of teams that are probably better than LSU, but to use the most worn out cliche’ — on any given day….
Remember last year, Oklahoma won it on its first appearance and that may have been the turning point for the future of the WCWS. ESPN and ESPN2 will televise up to 13 games this year from 3 in past years. Attendance for the tournament last year was 38,102, 11,000 more than the previous best in 1998.
When the attendance for the final game last year was announced at 8,049 as Oklahoma defeated UCLA, 3-1, the organizing committee realized that the WCWS has come of age.
“It was just a sea of people,” said Mark Loehrs, the Amateur Softball Association’s chief financial officer and the events coordinator for Hall of Fame Stadium. “It was just an awesome sight to see.”
Now Hall of Fame Stadium staff are working to see where more people can go, especially since the Sooners are back in the WCWS. “We’re setting up for 8,000 crowds, not 4,500,” Loehrs said. The extra fans strain the facility, but a $3.5 million expansion is in the works, much like the changes Rosenblatt had to make to keep up with times and the ticket demand.
Next year, 1,000 more parking spots will be added. By 2003, 3,000 more seats will be added to bring grandstand capacity to 5,000. There will be more bathrooms and more practice fields.
But growing pains are a good problem to have. This event started in Omaha of all places in 1982 and stayed there until 1987, when Sunnyvale, California played host to two tournaments. Since 1990, it’s been OKC’s baby, except for one year, 1996, when someone thought they could capitalize on Olympic Fever and have the event in Columbus, Ga. Compared to OKC’s attendance totals, it was a one-year experiment gone bad.
“I can’t believe all the changes here,” said Yvette Girouard as she surveyed Porter Hall of Fame Stadium.
It’s only going to get better if the NCAA does the smart thing and extends the deal further than its present 2004 time limit. OKC has no intentions of wanting to be Omaha. But it does want to make itself known on a national level as the place where eight great teams come to battle for a national title of its own.
It’s softball, not baseball. But like it’s counterpart, it deserves the very best. The folks in OKC are doing all they can to make sure the very best come to their stadium year after year to play for all the marbles.