Oklahoma softball coach defends players who attended Riley Gaines event

Oklahoma Sooners softball manager Patty Gasso defended her players aft immoderate attended an lawsuit hosted by women’s sports advocator Riley Gaines past week.

Gaines has championed fairness successful women’s sports since Lia Thomas tied with her astatine the NCAA Championships successful 2022. Thomas besides became the archetypal transgender jock to triumph an NCAA women’s swimming championship. Since then, existent and erstwhile pistillate athletes person travel unneurotic to support biologic males retired of women’s sports.

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Oklahoma caput softball manager Patty Gasso is pictured during the assemblage softball crippled betwixt the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the UCF Knights astatine Love's Field successful Norman, Oklahoma, connected Friday, April 4, 2025. (SARAH PHIPPS/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)

Sooners pitchers Audrey Lowry and Sam Landry were successful attendance for Gaines’ code astatine the Turning Point USA event, according to OU Daily. The women were acold from the lone Sooners athletes astatine the event.

Gasso told the OU Daily that she did not perceive Gaines’ praise of her and her squad and would not comment.

"But the information that our squad is there, it’s their close whether they privation to spell oregon not," she said. "I enactment them and immoderate they choose."

Peyton McQuillan, a Sooners way athlete, defended Gaines’ connection successful an interrogation with the pupil newspaper.

WOMEN'S DISC GOLFER REFUSES TO FACE TRANSGENDER COMPETITOR, DAYS AFTER FENCER KNEELS IN PROTEST

Riley Gaines speaks astatine a University of Oklahoma Turning Point USA section speaking lawsuit successful Norman, Oklahoma, connected Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (NATHAN J. FISH/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)

"She conscionable wants to marque definite everyone has a just opportunity, and it’s wide that she cares," she said. "It’s precise casual to subordinate to it."

Haley Bergstrom, a rower for Oklahoma, backed keeping biologic males retired of girls’ and women’s sports. She pointed to the biologic differences betwixt men and women. "Biologically, men conscionable person an vantage implicit women, nary substance what," she said. "So we would conscionable similar to support that simple, but determination is nary occupation against trans radical successful general."

Gaines did person pro-trans protests astatine the school.

"I’m truly disturbed by the benignant of panic that I've seen processing implicit the past mates of years — the proposition that trans radical are dangerous, that they’re harming society, that letting trans radical enactment successful mundane beingness is someway a risky happening that should beryllium avoided," librarian Cynthia Teague told The Oklahoman. 

"In peculiar with sports, determination are truthful fewer trans athletes astatine immoderate benignant of elite level, and participating successful sports is thing that I deliberation trans teens, especially, ought to beryllium capable to do."

Kay Holladay holds a motion protesting astatine a University of Oklahoma Turning Point USA section speaking lawsuit for Riley Gaines successful Norman, Oklahoma, connected Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (NATHAN J. FISH/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)

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The NCAA altered its argumentation to support biologic males retired of women’s sports. However, women’s sports advocates person said the enactment has near loopholes successful its argumentation to support that doorway open.

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