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Dave Wilson | ESPN

Texas Tech softball coach Gerry Glasco doesn’t fear much.

When Glasco watched Oklahoma’s Abigale Dayton blast a game-tying two-run homer in the top of the seventh inning on Monday night, “Sooner Magic” might have momentarily rattled him. But the Red Raiders rallied to finish off Oklahoma’s dynasty run in the bottom half of the inning.

On Wednesday, Texas Tech dropped the first game of the Women’s College World Series finals to Texas, a heart-wrenching 2-1 loss to the Longhorns in Game 1 of the best-of-three series (Game 2, 8 p.m. ET Thursday, ESPN). But Glasco’s not the type to panic with his back against the wall. He has overcome much more than this.

“Nothing about softball is scary to me,” Glasco told ESPN in April.

Glasco has lived a colorful life and has taken a winding path to becoming one of the best coaches in college softball at 66, making a run at a national title in his first season at Texas Tech.

But he also has the kind of perspective that comes from immense tragedy. In 2019, his youngest daughter Geri Ann died in a car accident when she was a volunteer coach for him at Louisiana.

“Once you realize that you don’t have fear of failure to keep you from doing things, you realize there’s things you can’t understand,” Glasco said. “You go for it.”

Glasco never thought he’d be taking on Texas in Oklahoma City. He never even thought he’d be a college softball coach. So how’d we end up here? It’s simple, said Glasco: Because of drug cartels.

Glasco is a gifted storyteller, which explains why he’s such a talented recruiter. Still, sometimes he glosses over things. So, let’s slow down a little bit.

“I’m a hunting guy, a dog handler,” Glasco said. “That’s all I did for a living four months a year. And then I go home and coach softball from March till November because I have three daughters. I just coached softball for fun.”

Glasco became the go-to hunting and fishing guide for more than two decades, taking businessmen and wealthy hunters quail and duck hunting in Mexico — about two hours south of Brownsville, Texas. He and his wife Vickie wanted to retire south of the border and build a house after Tara, Erin and Geri Ann got out of school in Illinois. He didn’t enjoy being away from his girls, but he tried to work to balance his livelihood with his family life.

“That was my whole childhood,” said Tara Archibald, Glasco’s oldest daughter and his pitching coach at Texas Tech. “He would leave in October and he would come back in late February, early March, coming back for holidays and stuff. I can remember him driving 48 hours from Mexico to Illinois, where he watched my eighth-grade basketball game and drove all the way back.”

But beginning in 2007, his trips across the border started becoming more treacherous.

“I’m driving 40 guns through Mexico and [the guns] are issued permits by the [Mexican] Army,” Glasco said. “In 2006, they stopped me three times and I showed the permits. In 2007, I got stopped 18 times and they made me get all 40 guns out. And they looked at every single serial number. I’d never done that.”

Finally, in 2008, some of his guests arrived late one night, so he was driving to pick them up at 1 a.m., when he was cut off by a truck. Glasco says soldiers jumped out, hit the ground and aimed rifles at him. He got out to try to assure them he didn’t want any problems, when he says he was struck by the butt of a rifle and swarmed by the Mexican army, before he was released.

The next day, Glasco says he was summoned by the local comandante, who apologized to him, before telling him they’d done that so no trigger-happy soldier took a jittery shot at him. But he was told that the disputes between rival drug cartels made it too dangerous for him to continue operating his business as usual, and he couldn’t just show up unannounced anymore. When he got back home to Illinois, he had a conference call with the Drug Enforcement Administration, who told him his clientele were too high profile and would become kidnapping targets if their travel arrangements or hunting licenses were leaked and the wrong people knew they were coming.

So Gerry Glasco pivoted.

Glasco had always loved softball. As a hobby, he spent seven seasons as the assistant softball coach at Johnston City (Illinois) High School, and spent one season as the head coach of the junior high team, where he went 27-0 and won a state title in 2007. His Illinois Southern Force organization that he built finished in the top 20 four times at nationals and won the 2004 18U Gold national championship. That year, Glasco and his staff were named the national travel softball coaching staff of the year by the National Fastpitch Coaches Association.

Georgia coach Lu Harris-Champer had recruited one of Glasco’s star Force pitchers, Kasi Carroll, who would become one of the best players in Georgia history. She asked Glasco where he was finding all his talent, because there wasn’t a huge softball scene in Illinois, and he explained that he’d recruit athletes off his daughters’ volleyball or basketball teams and teach them to play. She was impressed and told him that if he ever wanted to be a college softball coach, to give her a call.

With his dog-handling days in jeopardy, he started pondering that route. The Glascos weren’t wealthy. Gerry had grown up on a pig farm. He called his dad and asked if they could start it up again, but then he remembered how much he hated pig farming. His dad encouraged him to find something he loved.

So in 2008, he called Harris-Champer, interviewed, and got the job. He and Vickie took the leap and moved to Athens, Georgia, and the Bulldogs made it to the WCWS championship series in his first season. Harris-Champer said she was always drawn to how hard Glasco’s players played for him, because he was funny, charming and they knew he cared for them.

“It’s always fun,” she said of working with Glasco. “He’s hilarious. There’s energy. Whether things are going in the right direction or the wrong direction, doesn’t matter. The energy is there, the passion is there. The belief is there and the figure-it-out mindset is there.”

And that’s what Glasco was doing, figuring it out. First, as a recruiter, then as a hitting coach at both Georgia (2009-14), where his teams set 20 school offensive records and at Texas A&M (2015-17), where they broke eight.

When he landed the head coaching job at Louisiana, he didn’t slow down. From 2018-24, Glasco led the Ragin’ Cajuns to a 300-88 record, with five Sun Belt Conference regular-season titles and advanced to the NCAA tournament each season.

Along the way, he got to coach Hall of Famer Cat Osterman in the National Pro Fastpitch league.

He proudly remembers the pilgrimages he made, taking his girls, then a college freshman, an eighth grader and a preschooler to St. Louis, getting to a game two hours early and setting up lawn chairs behind the home plate backstop. It was there, he told them, that they were going to see the equivalent of Michael Jordan in high school, a high school junior from Texas named Cat Osterman.

She struck out 20 batters with 50 college coaches in the bleachers behind them as Glasco befriended her father, Gary, an engineer, who told him how he analyzed the spin on pitches and studied the engineering aspect of making the ball break.

“And she had the greatest rise ball in the world at 18 years old,” Glasco said.

By 2014, Glasco was no longer a fan of Osterman. His softball journey allowed him to coach her.

“Who would’ve thought in ’99, I’m watching the best pitcher in high school softball and 15 years later, I’m going to get to be her coach. That can’t happen,” Glasco said, adding that he didn’t do any coaching of Osterman other than to pencil her name into the lineup.

Now a general manager for the Volts in the Athletes United Softball League, Osterman has admired Glasco’s rise all these years, and seeing him work firsthand, she wasn’t surprised.

“He enjoyed watching how I worked and why I worked the way I did, because obviously I was well into my professional career when we crossed paths,” she said. “He’s always wanting to learn, which is kind of cool because sometimes people will feel like they know it all and they’re going to come and impart their wisdom. Gerry was the opposite. He took the opportunity to soak in what everybody had to say.”

Osterman, a Texas graduate, knows how impressive his work has been at Texas Tech, which had never won a conference title before this season. She’s not surprised that he was able to recruit NiJaree Canady, above and beyond the $1 million NIL deal. She knew firsthand how much his Louisiana players loved him, having coached star hitter Mihyia Davis in travel ball, who scored the game-winning run against Oklahoma that clinched the Red Raiders’ spot in the championship series. She said Davis’ star rose in high school and had Power 4 opportunities, but stayed committed to Louisiana.

“It was because Mihyia loved Gerry,” Osterman said. “When Gerry was leaving, he told her she should feel out her options. And she said, no, I’m coming with you. Mihyia entered the portal with the ‘do not contact’ label next to her name. She was either going with Gerry or not going anywhere.”

Four of the Red Raiders’ top seven hitters came with Glasco from Louisiana, something that wasn’t lost on Canady when she was considering making the move.

Those relationships matter to Glasco. He was devastated to beat another of his former players, Oklahoma pitcher Sam Landry, who wore No. 12 as a tribute to Geri Ann at Louisiana and had Geri Ann’s name on her glove during Monday’s game. The two embraced after their semifinal game, with Gerry telling her he loved her.

“We’re all part of Gerry’s family,” Osterman said. “His wife knows all of us. We all know Miss Vickie. I’ve gotten to know his daughters over time. He wants everyone to feel like they’re part of the Glasco family.”

That even includes his friend Texas coach Mike White, who coached Geri Ann at Oregon. He admires White for his path from New Zealand to a stellar coaching career in which he’s never lost a regional, something Glasco says is “impossible.”

“I thought about it last night,” Glasco said in a Tuesday news conference. “If Geri Ann was here, I don’t know if she’d root for me or White because she loved Whitey. She used to compare us a lot. She’d say, Daddy, Coach is just like you. He’s just got a more colorful vocabulary. She probably thought he was a little smarter than I am.”

Archibald, who left a head coaching job at Eastern Illinois where she went 40-17 last year to get a chance to work with her dad, said those family memories — including keeping Geri Ann close — have been a big part of the Red Raiders’ experience in Oklahoma City.

“There’s a lot of pride, there’s a lot of happiness, there’s a lot of excitement, but there’s also some grief involved,” Archibald said. “It’s hard to put into words obviously, but I feel like Geri Ann’s really right here with us and sending us signs everywhere we go. We walk in the stadium today and there’s a 12 in front of our face. I go to the laundry room and there’s a 12 on my washing machine.”

“I just feel like it’s kind of been written and supposed to be this way. With Sam [Landry], that was hard. That was so, so hard because she is a daughter to my parents and has been just so good to our family.”

Now, after ending the Oklahoma dynasty and beating Patty Gasso, who has the highest winning percentage (.811) of any coach with at least 1,000 wins, Glasco has one more shot at history in a championship series against Texas.

Harris-Champer expects Glasco to go all out, laughing how “awesome” it was to see Glasco calling Makayla Garcia to steal home in a win over UCLA on Saturday, saying she doesn’t remember ever seeing anyone do that at the WCWS before.

Texas Tech’s Makayla Garcia stuns UCLA by stealing home in epic fashion

Makayla Garcia breaks the stalemate by stealing home for Texas Tech in the top of the fifth inning vs. UCLA.

“He loves to steal home,” she said. “He loves to squeeze, loves to do things that are to force the offense, to force that aggression.”

Archibald said that’s all part of Glasco’s makeup. He goes for it.

“If we don’t have what we need to get it done, we’re going to find it,” Archibald said. “If we can’t score a run, we’re going to steal home. It’s an intensity that’s unmatched. He’s going to do things the right way, but where most coaches would be worried about how stupid am I going to look if we get thrown out stealing home, he doesn’t care. If that’s how we’ve got to score a run for NiJa, we’re going to figure out how to score a run for NiJa.”

As the WCWS has gone on, Glasco has become an overnight star, much like Canady was two years ago. There’s an adage around Lubbock this year with the media attention that she has drawn: They’ll come for NiJa and stay for Gerry.

“When we first started this whole process, some people were talking about doing a documentary on NiJa and the story and the team,” Archibald said. “We started laughing and we’re like, yeah, they think they’re going to do a documentary on NiJa. They’re going to get here and they’re really just going to follow Gerry everywhere he goes. He’s the real show.”

When he can find the time away from softball, Glasco still hunts quail, still has his part-time hunting guide business, and still goes to Mexico. He believes some things are predestined, including getting the Tech job when he did, at a school that was willing to go all-in on NIL, allowing him to land Canady and build an offense around her. He’s made his mark on softball history, the sport that saved him from pig farming.

He has one last chance this season to go for it.