Brylie St. Clair knows nothing comes easy in Sand Rock.
Besides the school, the churches and the cemetery, the tiny East Alabama town doesn’t offer much, the Mississippi State outfielder admits.
“We have a gas station that also serves breakfast, and there’s a four-way stop,” St. Clair said. “Not even a red light. Just stop signs.”
But St. Clair beat the odds to become a Southeastern Conference softball player. Now, she’s documenting her life for the next generation of girls from the Sand Rocks of the world.
With more than 123,000 followers on TikTok, St. Clair is using the social media service to be herself — and show those who might come next what it’s like to play for the Bulldogs.
“It was fun to really take my platform and channel it more for young softball girls,” St. Clair said. “They get to see, ‘This is fun. This is enjoyable. I want to be there. I want to be able to do that.’ It’s fun to be able to use my platform for that.”
St. Clair’s online presence has soared right along with her softball career. The junior is an everyday starter for the first time at Mississippi State, and she’s showing the package of skills that took her out of “the middle of nowhere” and into SEC country.
Bulldogs coach Samantha Ricketts said St. Clair has grown her offensive game and continued to develop the standout fielding that has made her a fixture in the lineup.
“She’s going to have the hot and the cold in the box, but being consistent on defense is really what she’s here to do,” Ricketts said. “She’s such a great outfielder for us — strong arm, a lot of range, knows where to go with the ball.”
St. Clair is naturally gifted with speed and instincts, but it took a lot of hard work to hone her skills in the outfield. She’d head straight to the softball field every day after school, watching the high school football players arrive at practice when she got there. She’d still be working out when football practice ended and the players drove away.
She wasn’t alone. St. Clair’s father Bert helped his daughter fine-tune her footwork and extend her range.
“He did a really good job getting me where I need to be,” St. Clair said. “He always told me to make the hard plays look easy and never make the easy plays look hard.”
A natural
St. Clair has done that, landing herself on the highlight reels by virtue of eye-popping catches in the outfield. She laid out to save a run in a key game against Tennessee last May and earned a spot on SportsCenter’s Top 10 Plays for it.
“She’s just a natural,” Ricketts said. “She gets really good jumps, good reads. Off the bat, some of her diving plays, it’s like she immediately knows where to be. Just that first step is really what sets her apart.”
That’s always been true of St. Clair, but it was her improved hitting that launched her game to another level this year. She hit .417 as a freshman but in just 12 at-bats before the 2020 season came to a premature end because of COVID-19, and her batting average the following year was barely half that.
Starting 20 of the 50 games she played in, St. Clair hit .211 in 2021, reaching a low point in the middle of SEC play when her average dipped below .200. With just one double and no home runs, her power wasn’t there, either.
That’s changed so far this season as St. Clair’s average sits at a solid .255 through 37 games. She’s driven in twice as many runs (eight) as she did in all of 2021 and has four doubles to her name already. She had seven hits in 10 at-bats as the Bulldogs swept rival Ole Miss in March.
St. Clair was previously used primarily as a slap hitter and a skilled bunter, but her ability to find her swing game at Mississippi State has been critical. Naturally left-handed, St. Clair said it’s nice to be able to be a more well-rounded player.
“I think at a point in my softball career, I was mainly slapping, but I think that having a lot of different skills that you can utilize on the field makes you a really hard out, and it’s fun to do,” St. Clair said.
St. Clair found her way onto the Bulldogs’ roster due to her success with the powerhouse Birmingham Thunderbolts club, which also featured current teammates Madisyn Kennedy, Kiki Edwards, Mia Davidson and Grace Fagan.
She began playing with the Thunderbolts at age 9 after making the transition from Little League baseball, wanting to be more competitive in a sport designed for girls.
She also found success at Sand Rock, helping the Wildcats make a run in the state playoffs as a senior in 2019, but Class 2A softball just couldn’t compare to the exposure St. Clair got from the Bolts.
“Fighting through that was fun,” St. Clair said of her final high school season. “Getting to experience that was fun. But travel ball really paved the way for me to get where I am today.”
That would be Starkville, where St. Clair fits into what everyone refers to as the “family atmosphere” at Mississippi State. She praised the “strong women” within the program and the Bulldogs’ coaching staff and said she was grateful to be part of the team.
“It’s really let little Brylie live out her dream,” St. Clair said. “When I was 12 years old, this was only something that I could dream of.”
‘The real me’
Now, St. Clair is sharing that dream with those who hope to follow in her footsteps. On TikTok, she lets her followers see inside the life of an SEC athlete via videos: riding the bus to a game; dancing with teammates in the locker room; taking batting practice in the indoor cages.
She said what she posts varies with her lifestyle, an outdoor-based way of life that comes with the territory in a town like Sand Rock, which is home to less than 500 people and where St. Clair admits there’s not much to do. She often posts videos of herself out hunting and fishing; one video of her teeing off on the golf course has 2.2 million views.
“I just feel like the different content reaches different people, so it’s fun to get all these different people who are interested in different things to be involved with my content,” St. Clair said.
Involved, they are. St. Clair’s following has grown rapidly. The golfing video, which she posted in March 2021, had 900,000 views when she headed in for a practice; when she got out and checked her phone, that number had doubled.
Being a burgeoning social media star comes with plenty of creepy comments that St. Clair has done her best to simply ignore. She still hears from her target audience, though: younger players who ask if the college softball lifestyle is fun.
Both in her answers and in her videos, St. Clair shoots them straight.
“I try to portray the real me in my social media,” she said. “I know a lot of people bank off striving for perfection in a lot of their content, and so I want to be relatable, especially for the younger girls who are coming up after me. I don’t want to give anybody any false sense of, ‘it’s not reality.’”
Brylie St. Clair’s reality, of course, has changed a lot these days. She said she hopes an “eye-opening” breakout season can set the stage for more success down the line.
“It’s an awesome feeling to know that they have the confidence in you to put you out there in center field and just know that you can get the job done and that they depend on you,” St. Clair said. “It’s meant a lot to get to be on the field and compete for them every day.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 51 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
