STILLWATER — When Oklahoma State softball coach Kenny Gajewski was searching for a new hitting coach, he called an old buddy, former OSU baseball player Tripp MacKay.

MacKay, who emerged as a highly respected hitting coach during an eight-year stint with the OU softball team, isn’t known to be much of a talker, but when the subject turned to up-and-coming hitting coach Whitney Cloer, MacKay suddenly turned chatty.

“He talked for 17 minutes straight and when he finishes, he goes, ‘Are you still there?’” Gajewski recalls of his conversation with MacKay. “I said, ‘Dude, I didn’t know you could talk that long.’”

But MacKay knew how special Cloer could be if given the right opportunity, and he believed OSU was that opportunity.

As third-ranked OSU enters a highly anticipated three-game series against fifth-ranked Florida State, opening at 6 p.m. Friday at Cowgirl Stadium, Gajewski’s squad is batting .381 as a team — 90 points higher than where it finished the 2022 season.

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OSU's batting stats on the rise

OSU is third nationally in batting average, fifth in runs per game at 8.16 and fifth in slugging percentage at .617 one month into Cloer’s tenure as hitting coach.

Of course, the competition will get tougher, and the numbers are sure to come down. But Cloer’s early returns are more than promising.

“This is exactly what I had hoped for,” Gajewski said. “I think she should be recognized. She came into a really tough spot. A lot of prideful people around here, which is a good thing. We’ve created that.

“We had to all swallow our pride a little bit and kind of go back to the drawing board and buy into something.”

That’s because Cloer isn’t just a swing coach. She teaches a unique philosophy that blends swing mechanics, mental approach and game planning. Without working the entire process, players can’t realize the full possibilities.

An Oklahoma native who played high school ball at McGuinness before heading to college at Arkansas, Cloer was always fascinated by the mechanics of hitting. She had a career .335 batting average over four years with the Razorbacks.

When she connected with MacKay, her pursuit of knowledge grew. After two years as a volunteer assistant at Arkansas, Cloer took a similar role at OU in 2013 while MacKay was the Sooners’ hitting coach.

After OU, she got her first assistant coaching spot at Troy University, then worked for the Scrap Yard Dawgs of National Pro Fastpitch before landing at Colorado State in 2018.

She spent five years there, but stepped away after last season.

Yet it was her time working with MacKay at OU that fed into Cloer’s passion as a hitting coach.

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MacKay, who played baseball at OSU in 1995-96, had developed his personal hitting philosophy while working as a private instructor in the early 2000s, then he landed at OU. The Sooner bats exploded a couple of years into his tenure under Patty Gasso, and not long after that, Cloer joined the program.

“She had a crazy appetite of wanting to know everything,” said MacKay, now in his fifth year as the head coach at Kennesaw State in Georgia. “You like those people that ask questions, but they actually ask the right questions. She was like, ‘I wanna know everything.’

“She and I had a lot of conversations about hitting. She just kept asking questions, and it made me a better coach, too, because I had to answer all the dadgum questions she was asking.”

After OU, Cloer was hired as the hitting coach at Troy, but after one season, she left to join the Scrap Yard Dawgs, where MacKay was the head coach.

“He took my foundation of what I had learned when I was younger and added onto it,” Cloer said of MacKay. “He taught me how to coach.”

From there, Cloer went to Colorado State where she continued to build on what she had learned from MacKay — not just replicating it, but making it her own.

MacKay had seen Cloer’s work, so when Gajewski called last year, MacKay had a clear message for his friend.

“You’re making a huge mistake if you don’t hire her,” he told Gajewski. “She’s ready. She knows my system better than I do. She’s taken it to new heights. She’s brought me stuff that I didn’t have that I use.”

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Gajewski and previous hitting coach Jeff Cottrill parted ways shortly after last season’s Women’s College World Series run that ended with a pair of semifinal losses to Texas.

Cloer had already left Colorado State and was set to join the Cowgirls in a lesser role while trying to figure out her next coaching step.

So by the time he was set to interview candidates for the vacancy, Gajewski had spent some time around Cloer, and he admits that he had concerns about whether her personality would fit with his program.

“I didn’t really like her at first,” Gajewski said. “She’s quiet. She’s hard to get to know.”

But after talking to MacKay and interviewing Cloer, Gajewski knew she was the person to reconstruct his team’s hitting philosophy.

Last fall came with bumps in the road. The players had to adjust to her approach and her system, both of which were different from what they were used to.

And Cloer’s philosophy requires full buy-in.

“Any athlete at this level who has been successful their whole life is gonna be like, ‘Why do I need to make changes?’” Cloer said. “I felt like, let’s figure out how we can help you achieve your ultimate goal. I felt like I could give them a different perspective that would help them do that.

“That’s all I was trying to do in those first couple of months.”

Frustration was heavy early in the teaching process, but players fought through it in the fall.

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“I think we all thought she was a little crazy at first,” said redshirt freshman Micaela Wark, who is batting .465 with four home runs in her first college season. “She changed a lot of things — my angle, the way I hold my bat, my stride. I think we all went through a phase where we were frustrated with our swings, because we were trying to build up to what she was expecting of us.

“Now we all joke with her, like, ‘You’re not crazy after all.’”

Gajewski faced some internal and external backlash for the change, particularly last summer, but with the difficulties of integrating Cloer’s philosophy behind them, life has gotten smoother.

“There was a lot of people that questioned me to my face, questioned me behind my back, ran their mouths,” he said. “It was a hard summer.

“I think she deserves a lot of credit. We still need to get better. We can’t be a three-week wonder here. We need to continue to punish people. I don’t expect anything less, but I know it’s gonna get hard. Proud of her and the way she’s worked.”

Not to be lost in all of this is the fact that Cloer is now an hour from her hometown. Coaching has taken her to a variety of locations, so she appreciates the opportunity to be back in Oklahoma.

“I absolutely love it,” she said. “I never thought in a million years I’d get to coach in Oklahoma. This has been a dream, to be honest. My family is just an hour away. My nephews are big OSU softball fans.

“Being back close to home… I couldn’t imagine anything better.”

OSU vs. Florida State

WHAT: Three-game series at Cowgirl Stadium in Stillwater (ESPN+)

WHEN: 6 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma State softball players excelling under new hitting coach