BY ROD JONES
OCU COMMUNICATIONS
Oklahoma City University softball short stop Analise Rayburn can slug it a long way. And she does so a lot.
With 22 home runs during the regular season and another four in the postseason to help propel the Stars to the Sooner Athletic Conference championship this year, Rayburn has been on a historic run during her career at OCU. She already has the second-most home runs (63) and third-most RBIs (249) in OCU softball history, and plans to return next season to add to her legacy as one of the greatest hitters to ever wear a Stars jersey.
To top it all off, she became the first NAIA player in history to have consecutive 100-RBI seasons this year and repeated as the SAC Player of the Year and NAIA first-team All-American and National Player of the Year.
Powerful evolution
While her name became synonymous with long balls all season, Rayburn wasn’t always a natural slugger. Coming out of Yukon, Oklahoma, she started attending summer hitting camps at OCU as a high school student, working with OCU associate head coach Bobby Bridges to perfect her swing.
Rayburn was originally a speedster, leaning on her legs to manufacture runs. It wasn't until her junior year of high school when the art of the swing started to click, hammering 17 home runs that season.
“I wanted to be the one that teams don’t want to throw to,” she said.
The extra hitting work paid off, equating to roughly a home run every six times at the plate during this past season at OCU. As her coach, Phil McSpadden, put it, “Even when it doesn’t look like she’s swinging that hard, the ball always seems to jump off her bat.”
The legendary coach, who has the most wins of any coach in college softball (and counting), would know a true slugger when he sees it.
“I've been blessed with some kids who became very talented international softball players, that played in the Olympics, etc. I don't know if I've ever had anybody hit the ball further than a couple of shots that she's hit,” McSpadden recalled. “I remember a time when she put one halfway up the light pole. I hadn't seen anything like that before.”
Team player
While many college athletes fight for every cent of athletic scholarship money, Rayburn, known to her team simply as AJ, did the opposite. Her teamwork mentality helped build a better roster when she surrendered an athletic scholarship for an academic one as a Meinders Fellow.
"AJ took a business scholarship so that the team could use her athletic money to recruit other players,” McSpadden explained. “She didn’t have to do that. It changes the recruiting pool entirely when you have someone that selfless."
Diamond-solid resilience
Rayburn’s journey hasn't been a smooth stroll around the bases. She began as a freshman at OCU in 2022. In her sophomore year, she underwent the first of two major knee surgeries – one on each kneecap – which she joked might have been why she focused on hitting so hard in the first place.
“If you hit a home run, you don’t have to run as fast,” she quipped.
Rayburn sat out the 2024 season, and when she returned to the lineup in 2025, her homerun totals began to climb. As her statistics continued to jump game by game, McSpadden said they kept focus on the team win totals rather than historical individual records. That was by design.
“I purposefully did not look up any records because she’s not the type that is concerned with that,” McSpadden says. “I didn’t want to plant that seed. She’s a very conscientious kid who feels the weight of the world if she lets her teammates down. If she goes two-for-three, she feels like she failed on that third at-bat, even if she already gave us the lead.”
This humility defines her leadership style. McSpadden said her quiet, lead-by-example approach is a reflection of her kindhearted nature.
“She would never be able to get in somebody’s face. It would be more of a ‘kumbaya’ conversation. But when she does say something, they know it means something,” he said.
Cracking the code
Rayburn hits the books as hard as she hits the ball as a graduate student in the Meinders School of Business MS Data Analytics program, where she trades home run trots for Python scripts and financial modeling.
Rayburn knew coming into college that she wanted to do something in the business world. She started her undergrad career as a business administration major and later learned it would be beneficial to focus on a specific aspect.
Despite a family tree full of accountants and a love for math, that job title wasn’t quite to her liking. Her continuing love for numbers led to a finance degree in 2025.
“I just want to be behind the scenes, do my work, and go home,” she said with a laugh.
Eschewing the creative side of marketing and the customer-facing roles of other fields, she found her sanctuary in data analytics.
She leveraged her academic prowess to secure a prestigious internship at Midland Mortgage, a service branch under the MidFirst Bank umbrella.
Finance professor Dr. James Ma noted her work ethics in a recommendation letter.
“Analise is an exceptionally capable and motivated student,” Ma stated. “What distinguishes her most is her intellectual curiosity and initiative… This balance reflects both confidence and a strong commitment to mastery.”
During her time at Midland last summer, she was part of an innovative new project using data analytics to help update loan deficiency charts, a workflow that previously took employees hours of manual typing.
“We spent a lot of time just automating what they had to do by hand,” she explained.
Her performance was so impressive that she was invited to return to the transaction management group this summer.
“I was never bored there,” she said. “Every day there was something I learned that I didn’t know the day before.”
As she prepares for three more semesters of graduate school and her final collegiate softball season, Rayburn remains the ultimate dual threat. Whether she’s staring down a pitcher or a complex data set, her approach is the same: find the challenge, make the adjustment and knock it out of the park.
“I am so thankful to have played under Coach McSpadden for my college career,” Rayburn said. “I wouldn't consider myself among the ‘greats’ that came through OCU, but I am very thankful for the awards I have received, and I cannot thank all my coaches enough for that.
“Without Coach McSpadden and Coach Bridges I would not be half the player I am today. I feel grateful for the time I have spent here and the teammates that have supported me and pushed me along the way.”
