KENNY G. the sweet sounds of

KENNY GAJEWSKI WAS HANGING OUT IN HIS SON PRESTON’S ROOM, THEIR NIGHTLY ROUTINE BEFORE THE BOY WOULD NOD OFF TO SLEEP, WHEN KENNY’S CELL PHONE BUZZED THEIR ATTENTION.

STILLWATER CALLING.

“MY HEART STARTED TO BEAT,” GAJEWSKI SAID. “I WAS LIKE, ‘WHO WOULD BE CALLING ME FROM STILLWATER?’”

EXCEPT DEEP DOWN, HE KNEW.

Oklahoma State was looking for a softball coach. And eventually, once Gajewski helped Florida to a second-straight Women’s College World Series championship, he surfaced as an OSU target.

Gajewski answered.

“I knew the job was still open,” he said. “And at that point, I knew it had become real.”

It only became more real when Gajewski (pronounced Guy-ess-kee) was flown in for an interview the next day, then announced by Mike Holder as the program’s seventh head coach on June 13.

What’s happened since – and it’s substantial – occurred amid a whirlwind of activity. Gajewski’s journey to his first head coaching job, however, couldn’t be more circuitous or slow-developing, starting as a budding prep baseball star in Los Alamitos, Calif., routing through four college stops as a player, two more as a volunteer assistant coach, a 10-year turn as a field maintenance guru and then a return to coaching that started with baseball, before he joined his pal TIM WALTON at Florida. Helping the Gators accomplish great things put him on the map for something more, which now involves restoring pride to a Cowgirl program that once was the jewel of the Midwest.

Phew.

“The path I’ve been on is nuts, but I really think it’s what’s prepared me to coach,” said Gajewski. “I tell people this a lot, only about 40 to 50 percent of what we do is Xs and Os. The rest is managing people.

“I think all these things I’ve done have helped me to be able to manage people. And I think that’s one of my strengths.

“I’m sure there are coaches out there who Xs- and Os-wise are ahead of me, but that’s just time. They’ve just managed more games. I don’t think they’ve got more knowledge, they’ve just got more experience. And we’ll catch them there.

“MY PATH IS WINDING. BUT EXCITING. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER TO BE HERE.”

Let’s get this out of the way up front, although it’s out of sequence: one of Gajewski’s stops was Oklahoma. That’s right, the Oklahoma Sooners. He played baseball there one season, one great season, as a pitcher on OU’s 1994 national championship squad. The following year he served as a volunteer assistant with the Sooners and then worked a full decade in Norman as the school’s turf and maintenance director.

So yeah, there’s some crimson in his blood.

“OU will always have a place in my heart, I can’t change that,” Gajewski said. “I told Coach Holder that when he interviewed me. I cannot change that. It’s not going away.

“But I’m here. I wear orange every day because I want everybody to know I love it here.”

Gajewski embraces the orange, too. Sitting for an interview, he was sporting an old-school “AGGIES” shirt, with the big O in the middle.

The same goes for his family, for Preston and daughter Logan. His wife, Kristen, may have initially had more trouble with it, as an OU graduate with deeper roots into that school, but the charm of OSU and Stillwater have swung her to the other side.

“My two kids, their pistols are firing every day,” Gajewski said. “They wear orange, it’s all they’ve got. My wife is a little different in the fact that she was born and raised here (in Oklahoma) and went to school there. But you know what, she’s all-in here now. She was probably the hardest one at first, but that’s normal. My wife is all-in now, she loves this place.

“Our family is so in tune. The more we’re here every day, it’s easier to see why this place is so great.”

Want more evidence? The Gajewskis are planting new roots.

“We’re building a house here,” Gajewski said. “Coach Holder asked me, ‘Are you building a house?’ I said, ‘We’re going to be here a long time, Coach.’

“That’s where it’s at.”

Getting to this place, at this time, required many turns.

There were the college playing days, starting at one university, one year of junior college and a misguided stint at a Division II school, before the move to OU, facilitated by a previous relationship with then-Sooners pitching coach Vern Ruhle.

After one year playing at OU and another year with the club as a graduate assistant, Gajewski took a similar job at Kansas State. The baseball wasn’t good, and he had to work a day job, heading to Junction City Country Club at 5 a.m. each day.

“I mowed greens and did all the dirty work,” Gajewski said. “I coached in the afternoon, went home and did it all again.”

It wasn’t one of his favorite years, but that’s where Gajewski learned turf maintenance. And soon he was back at OU, eventually finding himself in charge of all the school’s athletic fields and in a big job with big responsibilities and plenty of perks.

But also away from the intricacies of the game.

“I got away from the coaching part,” he said. “For 10 years I got away.”

And that was long enough.

“At some point, I decided it wasn’t the path I wanted to follow,” Gajewski said. “I really wanted to coach. As much fun as I was having, I wasn’t fulfilled.”

Gajewski returned to baseball, taking advantage of more connections to land at Tennessee in the director of baseball operations role. Meanwhile, former Sooners teammate Tim Walton was coaching softball at Florida and tugging Gajewski to join him.

It happened in 2013, with Gajewski arriving to upgrade the defense and play a part in two national title teams.

“The biggest thing that I saw was somebody who had a knack for seeing the little things,” Walton said. “We both had the same background playing wise. Just having the comfort of mind of having someone with the same vision and work ethic I have was probably the first thing that drew me to wanting to have him on board.

“He figured out how much he really missed coaching and how much he really missed working with kids. From the time that he came on board, he was just so passionate about it. Just an endless supply of energy. I think my quote when I hired him was, ‘I’m really excited to get Kenny on board to bring in his energy.’

“He’s got the energy. He’s very passionate. He’s an emotional person. You can have an emotional downer person or you can have an emotionally uplifting person. He’s very uplifting, very motivational, very inspirational. He just brings a great deal of energy — I’d say every day, but that would be a stretch — almost every day. That guy brings it.”

Gajewski has brought that, and more, to the Cowgirls.

Already, the results have been impressive. While only an abbreviated fall scrimmage season, against mostly less-than-Big 12 competition, Gajewski’s opening months on the job provided a stark contrast to past seasons. Previously stressed to score runs, these Cowgirls pounded the softball with regularity, OUTSCORING OPPONENTS

110-4 IN EIGHT GAMES – all wins. Against its only Division I competition of the fall, OSU traveled to Fayetteville and swept a doubleheader from Arkansas by a cumulative score of 26-1.

OSU averaged but 4.6 runs in 52 games a year ago, 1.7 in Big 12 play. During the fall, the Cowgirls got good pitching, too.

And better yet, it was good fun, for the first time in a long time, thanks to Gajewski and his staff.

“In a word, we love him,” said Vanessa Shippy, a sophomore softballer from Idaho. “He will come out and say he’s not responsible for the culture change, but I know that he is definitely. He and his coaching staff are the reason that our culture has completely shifted from last year to this year.

“All the players see it. All the coaching staff can see our change. Even the people in the community that I talk to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, we see you guys smiling, see you in better shape, see you having fun with the way you play.’ They notice the culture change. It’s awesome. I love it. I love him being here and his coaching staff.”

Much work remains. The competition spikes considerably in the spring.

But the Cowgirls needed a spark. And a start. And now they have it.

If anything, Gajewski said, the Cowgirls are ahead of schedule in their makeover.

“One of my biggest concerns when I got here was, ‘Is our team in good shape mentally? Good emotional shape?’” Gajewski said. “And they were. They needed a fine tune, and they needed someone they felt they could trust and count on. And I think that we’ve earned that over time. And we’ll continue to earn that. BUT I REALLY FEEL LIKE WE’RE 100 PERCENT BOUGHT IN.

“And it’s shown every day, whether that’s in practice or in our strength and conditioning or in our team building. I feel like they’ve been 100 percent in from day one.”

Beyond the team building, the new coach recognizes the need for program building. One of the attractions to the job for Gajewski was OSU’s rich history and tradition. Yet when he arrived, none of it was apparent.

There were no nods to past greats, not even Michele Smith , a household name in softball circles; no tributes to the 40 AllAmericans and 46 Olympians. There were no references to OSU’s 18 NCAA appearances or the seven Women’s College World Series berths that established the program as a force following its inception in 1975. And there were no former players or coaches attached to the team.

It was as if the history didn’t exist.

Gajewski is dusting off the trophies and putting up pictures, part of a major overhaul, of facility and of personal ownership.

“We’re trying to highlight what’s happened here,” Gajewski said. “That may have been the most disappointing thing on my interview. I knew what the history was, but it wasn’t displayed. You walk in this place and there was nothing on the walls.

“I told myself, ‘If I’m lucky enough to get this job, that’s the first thing I’m going to do, unite the old guard and the new guard. I need them. Our players need them. And I want our kids to know the people who built this place.’ And that’s been a focus.”

And it’s appreciated.

“One thing I noticed last year, as a freshman I didn’t know if it was normal or not, but we didn’t have a lot of alumni hanging around,” Shippy said. “We didn’t even have girls from previous seasons, two years, three years, that recent.

“Now Coach is embracing our alumni and hoping that everyone can come back and embrace it again and make it a place where you want to be. Those old trophies, that’s a big deal as far as who we are. As a freshman, that history is something I didn’t even know anything about because it had been hidden away.

“I know he has plans to make that a bigger deal. Not to show off or anything, but to make us proud of who we are and make our fans proud of who we are. I think it’s going to be great.”

Gajewski has spent but three seasons in a full-time coaching capacity. Still, he has backers and plenty of people insisting that a lack of experience won’t be a drawback.

“I think he’s going to be good,” Walton said. “Not very many people have the opportunity to be the head coach for the first time of such a storied program. Oklahoma State, for so many, many years had been the program of the Midwest. The challenges, obviously, are to get the softball program at Oklahoma State back to the level it was at in the Big Eight.

“We all want to win every game, and there are so many more important things than winning and losing. For him to be able to leave his mark on the program and get them to do the little things, he’ll be able to get them to win eventually.”

Gajewski is pushing the pedal on progress.

The Big 12 is rugged, and Oklahoma operates as a national power just down the road. Still, Gajewski is preaching winning. And winning big.

“I’m not preparing them to win our conference,” Gajewski said, “I told them, ‘We’re preparing you to go win a national title.’ And I know what that looks like. I know what it’s like as a player. I know what it’s like as a coach, not the head coach, but on a coaching staff. And I’ve seen it in many sports, from football at OU to softball and baseball.

“I’ve seen it, firsthand. I know what it takes. And it’s not easy. It’s not average. It’s not mediocre. It’s bringing extra effort every day.”

Gajewski is bringing it already.

“He comes every day to practice with a new game plan, a new practice plan, excited,” Shippy said. “We all love it. We love going to practice. It’s fun, there’s an energy. HE JUST TEACHES US THE GAME AND HAS A DRIVE TO WIN.

“I’m excited to get out there. I love his coaching style. I love playing with the girls around me. I know our seniors just can’t wait to see what this season is going to bring. They all wish they had more seasons with him.

“I’m thankful I’m only a sophomore and I get multiple seasons with him and the staff. We’re ready to get back at it and see what the season can bring. The fall, not that it’s a tease or anything, but it really was. I’m excited to see how we do this spring.”