'Why are we wearing shorts?': Opinions still strong over one of softball's biggest debates

OKLAHOMA CITY — The game room at Jamie Fox Taylor’s house in Tulsa is a bit of a shrine to her softball career.

There are pictures. Jerseys. Mementos.

Among her favorite things are the framed team posters from her years at Oklahoma.

Among her least-favorite things — what the Sooners were wearing in the poster her senior year.

“Our poster is with us in shorts,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Ugh!’”

She laughed.

“That poster that’s framed at my house forever — shorts on. Gross.”

As the Women’s College World Series rolls into the jam-packed weekend, there will be lots of serious moments as the field is reduced to two. Teams will be eliminated, ending seasons and even careers. 

We will chronicle all of it.

But not today.

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Instead, we are talking about an issue that has divided softball for years — shorts vs. pants.

Softball players nowadays may not even realize this has ever been an issue. Pants have become so widely accepted and worn in the sport, most players of this generation will scoff and roll their eyes at the mere idea of wearing shorts in a game.

“Even in practices or when they come to camps or anything, they’re always full-on softball pants,” Team USA pitcher and former Texas ace Cat Osterman said. “To me, going to softball practice was athletic shorts and a T-shirt.”

And if Osterman had her druthers, she’d always wear shorts in games.

“There’s just more range of motion,” she said. “You don’t feel restricted.”

There was a time when shorts were the norm in both international and collegiate play. Shorts were actually the rule in international play until 2016 when the rule changed to allow teams to wear either shorts or pants.

In college, the change was earlier but less uniform, no pun intended.

Teams have long been allowed to wear either, but in the early 1980s when the NCAA first started crowning softball champions, shorts were the norm. Mike Candrea remembers being stunned by it when he was hired as Arizona’s head coach in 1986.

“With my baseball background, I’m going, ‘Why are we wearing shorts?’” he said, referencing his college baseball career and his coaching start as a baseball assistant. “We started wearing pants right away.”

But almost two decades later, most teams were still wearing shorts.

When did Oklahoma, Oklahoma State players start wearing pants?

When Oklahoma won its first national title in 2000, for example, the Sooners did so in shorts.

Around that time, a time of transition began. Programs often had some uniform combinations with shorts and some with pants. 

Oklahoma State started that transition in the late 1990s. Mariah Gearhart, who played on the Cowgirls’ 2011 WCWS team, says the uniforms were all pants when she arrived in Stillwater in 2008. 

She was grateful for that.

“I had to convince my travel ball team to only wear pants, and that was in 2005,” she said. “In 2006, I was finally an upperclassman on the team and got to get rid of the shorts completely.”

The transition at Oklahoma lasted a little longer. Fox Taylor was a senior in 2007 when that photo for the team poster was taken in shorts, but she remembers wearing both shorts and pants in games throughout her Sooner career.

Weather, practicality cited for uniform change

“Weather dictated some of that,” Fox Taylor said. “I remember Coach (Patty) Gasso … for the most part, she let the seniors decide.

“There were people that fought hard to wear shorts, and there were people that were like, ‘No! Can we please wear pants?’”

Fox was solidly in Team Pants for lots of reasons.

Some were aesthetic.

“It looks more professional, and it was more put together,” she said of wearing pants. “It just looks cleaner.”

But much of Fox Taylor’s motivation for wearing pants was practical.

“You had your sliders under the shorts,” she said of compression sliding shorts, “but if you slid, your sliders would come up. So, we would tape our sliders to our leg, tape the slider down so that if you slid, your slider had a better chance to stay so that you didn’t get a big strawberry.”

And if you already had a strawberry?

“You were mega taping it because you did not want that sliding up.”

Even with all that, some players pushed for shorts.

Near as anyone can tell, Oklahoma was the last team to wear shorts in the WCWS. The Sooners did so less than a decade ago in 2012. It was for the third and deciding game of the championship series, it pitted Oklahoma vs. Alabama, and it has become the stuff of legend.

As the story goes, the players lobbied Sooner coach Patty Gasso between Game 2 and 3, saying they wanted to wear shorts. On a team led by Keilani Ricketts and Lauren Chamberlain, they ultimately swayed Gasso by saying that the last time the program had won a title, it had done so in shorts.

So, shorts it was.

But when the Sooners got to Hall of Fame Stadium, they found themselves in a rain delay before the game even started. For three hours, they sat in the locker room.

The game didn’t start until almost 10 p.m.

Then in the middle of the game came another rain delay. This one only lasted about 15 minutes, but when the Sooners returned to the field, they lost their momentum and their lead. The Crimson Tide won the game and the title.

Oklahoma hasn’t worn shorts in the WCWS since.

Neither has any other team.

Fox Taylor decided to put a poll on the Oklahoma softball alumni’s Facebook page and see where former players came down on the issue, and many who preferred shorts said it was because the pants they had were heavy, itchy and uncomfortable.

“Most say if they had pants like they have now,” Fox Taylor said, “then they would be pants all the way.”

No doubt the technology baked into uniforms now is vastly different than it was even a decade ago. 

“I don’t want to say like your dry-fit T-shirt type of thing,” Osterman said of the material currently used in uniforms, “but it’s a material that’s not horrible. It’s not soaking up your sweat where it’s sticking to you and things like that.”

Team USA will be wearing all pants in the Olympics later this summer, by the way. 

Shorts, it seems, have become almost a novelty.

“There’s a travel (softball) organization in Texas called The Blaze, and they actually have a shorts uniform,” Osterman said. “They’ll always #herearetheshorts or #throwbackshorts.”

What was once the norm is now an oddity. Some lament that fact, but many, many more, it seems, cheer the change. 

Good riddance to shorts in the sport.

“For sure,” Fox Taylor said, “Team Pants.”

Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK and follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok.