Ruby Meylan Fought for Her Happiness, Now the Cowgirl Ace Feels Better than Ever Inside and Outside the Circle

STILLWATER — Oklahoma State ace Ruby Meylan is back for an encore performance after earning second-team All-American honors last year.

However, when she steps inside the circle this year, likely on Thursday at No. 18 Stanford, she won’t be the same person the Cowgirls relied so heavily on in 2025.

“She’s way different,” coach Kenny Gajewski said. “I’ll tell this story. It was about a month ago, she called me, and she just said, ‘Are we good?’”

Meylan couldn’t shake the feeling that their relationship had changed since the Cowgirls season ended in regional play, snapping the active streak of five consecutive Women’s College World Series appearances.

“I think after I transferred (to Oklahoma State in the summer of 2024), I say this a lot, but I felt a little like broken,” Meylan said. “I don’t exactly know how to explain that, but I felt, my self-confidence was shattered. It was gone, and I almost needed his approval with everything I was doing. I needed him to tell me that I was doing a good job and that I was getting better, and I’m where I needed to be.”

At some point this offseason, Meylan felt Gajewski pull back, so she finally decided to call him. Initially surprised, the OSU coach assured her they were great.

“She was just like ‘you and I don’t talk as much,’” Gajewski said. “And I said, ‘Well, you don’t need as much attention as you needed last year.’ And she goes, ‘You’re right. I just needed to know that we’re good.’ And I said, ‘I’m thrilled. I think I’m so proud of you because last year you took a lot of my attention and I’m okay with that.’”

Once he put it that way, Meylan realized she felt the same way.

“And I think now I know, I know exactly who I am,” she said.

Rebuilding Ruby

As she alluded to, Meylan didn’t arrive in Stillwater in the best shape mentally.

As a sophomore at Washington, she felt like she struggled both in softball and in other aspects of life.

“Wasn’t very happy, just at all,” Meylan said. “Was in a pretty toxic relationship, didn’t have a great relationship with my parents. I just felt like the world was crumbling.”

With the Cowgirls, Meylan found a fresh start in several key areas, freeing her up to put in the work needed to fix everything else.

“I’ve worked really, really hard to be mentally strong and figure out what I need on a daily basis in order to show up and be the best softball player I can be. … I think I’m just super happy off the field,” Meylan said. “And it makes me able to go to softball and not be worried about anything but softball, which has made me a lot better at softball.”

The pitcher singled out her awesome family and the best roommates for helping her get to a better place. She also praised her fiancé, former Cowboy baseball player Brayden Smith, who went in the 13th round of the 2025 MLB Draft.

I get to marry my best friend!!! @cowgirlsb @OSUBaseball 💍🧡 pic.twitter.com/lQxrRzJPLR

— Ruby Meylan (@rubymeylan) February 1, 2026

Since her interview previewing the season last week, Meylan and Smith announced their engagement on Sunday.

“I have the best boyfriend ever,” Meylan said. “He’s so awesome. He’s so great. We’ve been dating for like eight months now. He’s been awesome. He’s a baseball player. He plays for the Orioles, so that’s been awesome to have him like, talk softball, baseball, and we go through a lot of the same things. So that’s great.”

One reason Gajewski doesn’t worry about Meylan these days is the way she enters the softball facility now, which has been quite the change from last year.

“She feels like she’s 6-foot-6 this year,” Gajewski said of his 6-2 pitcher. “That’s how she feels because she’s walking taller. Her shoulders are up, her smile (is visible) and her head’s up.

Chasing More

Despite finishing on May 18th in the regional round, Meylan still pitched 209 innings, putting her with the ninth-largest workload of any pitcher.

For context, two of the pitchers who finished ahead of her were still pitching in June. Only 16 pitchers in the nation threw 200 innings, and four of them advanced to supers or beyond last season, allowing them to space out their workloads a little more.

“I think I was mentally just done,” Meylan said. “Like it was a weird spot for me to be in. I was super sad we lost, but it was almost like a relief after a couple days because I was like, I can’t do it anymore, like I was so mentally exhausted, which is what we’re trying not to do (this year).”

Assistant coach Carrie Eberle Parker recently told Meylan that the Cowgirls plan on limiting her more early in 2026 so she can stay fresh when the team needs her most.

“So staff is going to be great and help me out,” Meylan said, expressing confidence in her fellow pitchers. “But yeah, I think I was just super exhausted. Obviously, I was super sad and unfulfilled. But I think, I mean, it was supposed to happen that way, and it’ll work out this year.”

In addition to second-team All-American honors, Meylan finished with a unanimous spot on the All-Big 12 First Team and earned conference weekly honors three times between March 4th and April 22nd.

Her season-long ERA finished at 1.81, the 18th best mark in the nation, but it was as low as 1.32 on April 6th. Anything under 1.45 would have put her inside the top five.

“I was so high for so long, like I was so it’s like, this is the best I’ve ever done,” Meylan said, recalling how she felt at the end of last season. “This is awesome. I’m getting all this recognition, but there’s no fulfillment at the end because, yeah, you’re an All-American, but you’re sitting at home watching the World Series. It feels good for about a day, and then it’s like the sadness sets in.”

With that in mind, both the ace and the Cowgirl coaches spent the offseason working to push Meylan to the next level.

“There’s still room, Ruby is nowhere close to what she’s going to be,” Gajewski said. “Unfortunately, we probably will never see, at OSU, her best because she’s got so much room to still grow. She’s nowhere close to her prime years. She’s gonna be finding that in the next five to 10 years if she continues to play.”

Gajewski said they challenged her to add more to her pitches.

“Want to get the changeup to be a respected pitch,” he said. “It’s very hard to throw, to learn. If you didn’t learn that at a young age, it’s very hard. So, she’s worked her tail off all summer long. She visited with Michele Smith some. She’s sought other help on that. It’s been great. Her and Carrie have worked their tails off. It’s coming along. Rise ball too improved. I mean, she’s a pitcher.

“Now, when she misses over the plate, we can hit her, and she knows that. But when she throws these pitches to the corners of the plate, we have no shot. No shot. And neither does anybody else in the country. So, it’s been really cool to watch. She just has some different things now that you can’t just look drop. And if you do, Carrie will be able to tell, and you’ll be in trouble.”

Meylan didn’t just limit runs last season. She drove people off the field with her arm, striking out 238 batters, which ranked 10th nationally.

Of course, for someone with as much experience and success as Meylan, the next step doesn’t always take a huge leap.

“What we were trying to do was make the smallest tweaks to become like 1% better,” Meylan said. “Because it’s hard to make huge leaps of growth at this time in my career, like I’m getting older, and I think just making small tweaks here and there to get a little bit better. So it was challenging, but we worked a ton this summer and this fall, and it was awesome. It was the best I’ve ever felt.”