Michele Smith has watched the WCWS grow from ESPN's broadcast booth: 'It's pretty special'
Michele Smith knows what the Women’s College World Series was like in the before times.
Before it was played in Oklahoma City, that is.
Smith was a softball phenom, a pitching ace and a hitting star, in her senior year at Oklahoma State when the Cowgirls made it to the WCWS in 1989. That was the last season the pinnacle of college softball was played in Sunnyvale, California.
Smith, who went on to win two Olympic gold medals with Team USA, remembers the tournament being on a slow-pitch softball field.
"One of the things I distinctly remember was that the field was so crowned, you couldn’t even put a bunt down," Smith said. "You put a bunt down, the field was so crowned that the ball would roll foul.”
Stand at home plate, and the curve of the infield was so pronounced that you couldn’t see the feet of the outfielders.
"It was not," the softball Hall of Famer said, "an optimal environment."
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Oklahoma City and USA Softball Hall of Fame Stadium may not be perfect ― nothing is, after all ― but where college softball is concerned, it doesn’t get any better than this.
This week, the WCWS makes its glorious, raucous return to OKC. It will be the 32nd year that major-college softball has crowned its champion at Hall of Fame Stadium, and along the way, the WCWS has become more than just a tournament.
It’s a spectacle.
Tens of thousands of fans pour through the gates during the week-long tournament as millions more watch on TV. There are tailgates in the parking lots and reunions in the stands. There are super fans dressed in all sorts of regalia and youth softball teams wearing matching uniforms.
How did it get so big?
No one has a more unique perspective on the growth of the WCWS than Smith. Not only did she experience the tournament before it moved to Oklahoma City, but she has also had a front-row seat for its development here as the lead analyst for ESPN’s softball broadcasts.
She’s had a cat-bird seat for every WCWS game for decades.
"It’s pretty special," she said of what the WCWS has become. "I love it because I’m a softballer. I love the sport."
So does OKC.
But how did this love affair come to be? How did Oklahoma City become softball’s mecca? How did the WCWS become one of the hottest tickets in town?
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'It was pretty incredible'
Michele Smith believes the event’s success starts with the stadium.
Much like a painter needs a good canvas, college softball needs a good venue for its championship. In the early years of the WCWS — the NCAA first crowned a softball national champion in 1982 — the stadium wasn’t always stellar.
Hall of Fame Stadium was.
Even though Smith never got to play the WCWS there, she played regular-season games at what was then the newly opened Hall of Fame Stadium when she was at OSU. The stadium opened in 1987, and the Cowgirls were among four local teams to christen the facility with a two-day, round-robin tournament
"That was back when the berms didn’t even have grass on them," she said of the hills stretching down the baselines that used to provide overflow seating for fans. "It was all just the red clay.
"But I think anytime you walk into a stadium like that, it just felt big. It was pretty incredible."
Even though the stadium only had about 2,000 permanent seats in those days — a far cry from the 9,000 it has now after an upper deck was added a few years ago — Hall of Fame Stadium was a huge step up for the sport. Many college teams were still playing on city-owned rec fields back then, so a softball-specific venue was special.
And when the NCAA awarded OKC the WCWS for the first time in 1990, Smith knew it would work. Not only was the venue great, but Smith felt like softball was always embraced by Oklahomans.
"It just seemed like it was a natural fit," she said.
But the popularity of the WCWS didn’t explode because the canvas and the supplies were good.
It took work.
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'If you get all the right parties ... it can make a significant impact'
Michele Smith doesn’t pinpoint any one thing as making the WCWS into a phenomenon but rather a series of events.
It starts with the city of Oklahoma City and USA Softball continually investing in the stadium complex. Capacity has been expanded. Amenities have been added. Infrastructure has been improved.
Even this year, fans at the WCWS will see upgrades. An improved walking path from overflow parking at Remington Park to the stadium. A new massive digital scoreboard. New ribbon boards on the upper deck so fans sitting in the temporary outfield bleachers can easily see game information.
"If you get all the right parties working together," Smith said, "it can make a significant impact."
The next variable in the success of the WCWS has been the success of OU and OSU. The Cowgirls were regulars in the WCWS’s early years in OKC, making the field four times in the 1990s. The Sooners won their first national title in 2000, then made the WCWS each of the next four years.
All of that pushed the accelerator for attendance.
Ditto for more recent years. The Sooners have become a dynasty, winning five national titles in the past decade, and the Cowgirls have become a national power, making the WCWS field three consecutive times.
Having local teams in the WCWS regularly “helps drive that train, as well,” Smith said.
Another component to the event’s success is the influx of youth softball tournaments that have been scheduled in the OKC metro area at the same time as the WCWS. This might not be an obvious step to many, but Smith believes it is important.
"Because it was a captive audience," she said.
Sure, the teams have games to play, but they also have downtime. Many of the teams are from out of state, and since sequestering girls in their hotel rooms for hours on end probably isn’t a great idea, lots of the teams make an outing of a WCWS game.
"When their games are over, they’re going to be able to go watch some of the best players in the college game,"Smith said, "so that they can strive to have the opportunity to say, 'Hey, this is my goal. I want to play in the Women’s College World Series some day. I want a college scholarship to help pay for my education.' "
Even with all of that, Smith says the biggest key for the growth of the WCWS has been TV.
Now, it might seem natural for her to say that ― she gets a paycheck from ESPN, after all ― but it’s impossible to deny the impact of the World Wide Leader on the Women’s College World Series.
'It all marketing and visability'
Michele Smith never intended to make a career out of broadcasting softball games.
She was a pre-med major, after all.
But in 1997, while she was still playing professionally in Japan, she was hired to do color commentary for the finals of the junior world championships. The United States vs. Japan.
"And they basically just said, 'Just say what you see and talk softball,' " Smith said.
"Oh, wow, that’s great,” she remembered thinking sarcastically. "Let me see if I can figure this out."
For the next decade or so, she did a dozen or so game broadcasts a year, but most of them were during a two or three-week period during the NCAA Tournament. ESPN decided in 2001 to broadcast every game of the WCWS instead of just the semifinals and finals, but still, there wasn’t much else being broadcast the rest of the year.
All that changed about the time Smith retired from playing in the late 2000s. ESPN started broadcasting more regular-season games and conference-tournament games.
Then in 2016, it expanded its coverage to include every game of the NCAA Tournament.
"I could have never imagined how much I’m talking about softball, which is a great thing," Smith said.
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But ESPN has gone all-in on softball. Hundreds of regular-season games are broadcast. Nearly every conference tournament is on the air, too. But no softball-related event gets more love from ESPN than the WCWS.
"We have a team of over 200 people that love the event," Smith said. "I mean, they work their butts off for the event. And it shows in the broadcast. You can see the passion. You can see the energy."
There’s passion and energy from the teams and the fans, but it’s also there from broadcasters. They don’t just show the games and talk about them. They highlight the atmosphere and the fans and the city.
"It’s helped create the atmosphere that people watching in California or Washington or back in the Northeast are like, 'This is a bucket list event for me. If I can get tickets, I want to go and watch someday no matter who’s playing,'" Smith said.
"It’s visibility, right? It’s all marketing and visibility. It’s people seeing it."
Last year, an average of 1.7 million viewers watched WCWS games, better than the 1.6 million watching the Men’s College World Series. What’s more, OU’s title-clinching win against Texas drew a peak of 2.1 million viewers. The highest peak during baseball’s championship: 1.9 million viewers.
Thing is, people aren’t just watching the WCWS.
They are coming to it, too.
'It was little steps along the way'
The COVID shutdown shuttered the WCWS in 2020, the year the renovated stadium with an added upper deck was set to open.
The delay didn’t slow down attendance.
Over the past two years, 17 of the 19 sessions have been the highest-attended sessions in WCWS history. All had announced attendance figures over 9,900, and a dozen of them had crowds in excess of 12,000.
Smith marvels at what has become not only of the WCWS but also of the sport she so dearly loves.
The WCWS helped the sport to grow. The players are better. Ditto for the coaches and the games. And now, the elevation of college softball is making the WCWS even better. The whole thing has become a cycle, each one helping the other.
But even as the wows have gotten bigger, the highlights grander, the home runs mightier, the growth of the Women’s College World Series is more like small ball. It was series of moments that might not seem all that exciting when looked at individually, but the final result is a game changer.
"It was little steps along the way that really helped build this to what it is," Smith said. "But I think each one of those little steps was imperative for the next step to really help grow the end goal, the end product."
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK and follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok.
Women's College World Series
When: June 1-8 or 9
Where: USA Softball Hall of Fame Stadium
TV: ESPN networks