OSU Softball: Cowgirls Open Big 12 Play against Reigning Player of the Year NiJaree Canady and Texas Tech

STILLWATER — It sounds extreme, but a softball series played this weekend in early March might go a long way in crowning a Big 12 champion in May.

Oklahoma State heads to West Texas for a three-game series against Texas Tech that starts at 6 p.m. Friday. The Cowgirls and Red Raiders were picked first and second, respectively, in the Big 12 preseason poll, and they’ll meet in the first conference series of the season.

OSU swept Tech in Stillwater last season, including a pair of run rules, but this Red Raider squad isn’t last year’s team.

Discussing Tech softball in 2025 starts with pitcher NiJaree Canady. While at Stanford last season, Canady was the USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year in a season in which she had a .73 ERA and 337 strikeouts, two stats she led the nation in. OSU scored 30 runs against Tech in the series last season. Through 10 appearances in the circle this season, Canady has given up just nine runs. She’s 7-2 this year with a .62 ERA. She’s struck out 96 batters and walked only five.

Canady was the last pitcher the Cowgirls saw last season, as she led Stanford to an 8-0 win against OSU in the Women’s College World Series. The Cowgirls got three hits that day in the loss.

“I think the only thing I remember about that is we didn’t score,” OSU coach Kenny Gajewski said. “And that’s kind of been where we’ve been headed. I’m excited about the challenge when those games come. I’m excited about that. They gotta hit our kid, too, and our kids. And we’ve gotta hit all of their kids because not everybody can throw every inning of every game here. When we get to that point, it will be a lot about those two arms, but there will be others that have to play well on both of those sides for teams to win this thing.”

Gajewski is right, the Red Raiders will also have to find a way to get hits against OSU’s All-American transfer arm Ruby Meylan. Meylan is 8-0 this season with a 1.29 ERA.

This won’t be the Cowgirls’ first run in will a high-caliber pitcher this season. Just last week OSU beat Jordy Bahl and Nebraska 1-0. Texas A&M’s Emiley Kennedy was an All-American last season, and OSU beat Kennedy and the Aggies 6-5 in Clearwater.

OSU enters this series at 15-4 on the year and on an 11-game winning streak. The Red Raiders are 18-6, most recently splitting a pair of games against No. 5 Texas A&M. It looks like Arizona, at 21-2, is going to have a say in the Big 12 title race, but there’s a chance that we look back to this March 7-9 series at the end of the year for the role it played in that race.

“It’s big — this conference, they’re all big,” Gajewski said. “It doesn’t matter. Texas Tech has given us fits my whole time here. I think in my whole time here, they may have been to postseason play once (in 2019), and they’ve given us fits every dang year. It’s nothing new to us.”