Jim Gasso
Jim Gasso and Patty Froehlich
Patty Gasso is one of the most successful coaches in the history of college softball. She has led her team to four national championships and has built a national powerhouse that has produced hundreds of All-Americans.
She also has a deep spiritual walk with Christ. She uses softball as her platform to share Christ’s message with young athletes and leads a voluntary Bible study with her players.
Patty Froehlich
Patty Froehlich is a successful American softball coach. She is currently the head coach at the University of Oklahoma and has been doing a great job of leading the team.
She has won over 40 games in a season several times and has helped turn the team into a national power. Her career is not over yet, and she has plenty of time to accomplish even more.
A native of Southern California, Patty Froehlich loved to play softball as a child. Her backyard opened onto a park where the kids played nonstop games and her mother coached them.
When she started coaching, her first experience came at Bishop Montgomery High School, where she starred and also played on the varsity basketball team. She went on to El Camino College and Long Beach State, where she was a three-time all-conference softball player.
After a couple of years in California, her husband moved back to Oklahoma. She had to rely on her family for support, and despite her difficult marriage and raising their two sons, she led the Sooners to the NCAA title in 2000.
Jim Froehlich
Jim is a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. His research focuses on vascular disease care, predictors of care delivery and healthcare disparities.
He has authored several articles and book chapters in the area of vascular health and prevention. He has a particular interest in anticoagulation quality improvement.
In addition to his responsibilities in the medical field, he is also the husband of Patty Froehlich and father of two sons, J.T. and D.J. He is a lifelong shopper, a voracious reader and a self-described music geek.
Aside from coaching baseball and a job as director of housing operations at the University of Dayton, there is little that he doesn’t enjoy doing with his wife and kids. A couple of years ago, he even put together a small team of volunteers to create a mobile app that streamlined the transitional housing process at UD. He also is a great advocate of promoting healthy eating and exercise to his students.
Coaching
Coaching is a powerful tool for performance management. It enables leaders to shift from traditional, supervisory roles to more consultative and participative ones that encourage employees to acquire, apply and share their knowledge.
As a coach, you can use your skills to help people improve their performance, resilience and work-life balance. Coaching also has a positive impact on their health and well-being, helping them to gain greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, social connection and stress management.
But the best way to coach is to do it from your heart. You must love and value the players you have, and the coaches you surround yourself with, as much as they do.
Then, you can coach them with the same passion, vigor and purpose you’ve had for the past 25 years at OU softball. That’s how you build a winning team, and how you instill something more than wins on the field into your players: faith.
And that’s what has made Gasso an effective coach for so long. She has a deep love for her players, and she has worked hard to instill that same love and devotion to God in them.
Faith
In the demanding grind of a long softball season, Gasso understands what happens inside the team room is just as important as what happens on Marita Hynes Field. It’s where the team watches film, discusses strategy and holds postgame news conferences. It’s also where the players hold voluntary prayer services, Bible discussions and chapel services before their Sunday games.
The study of faith has been one of the most controversial and complex areas in theology and psychology, with many people offering radically different accounts of what faith is–to such an extent that there is still no agreed-on basic ontological category.
There are cognitive, affective and evaluative components to faith, but these are usually considered in the context of one’s preferred meta-theory of value. There is also the possibility that some people might have faith in God, but that it may not be a psychological state and therefore does not belong to any of these categories.
The impact of faith on the lives of individuals and groups is often difficult to measure, but it can be quite profound. For example, it can change the way we view ourselves and others. It can make us feel more connected to a group and it can help us see the world in a new light.
Watch out for the rest of Time fores for more interesting and useful articles.