Aspen Wesley was early.

The Neshoba Central High School senior showed up to the school’s softball field an hour with her father Kent before any other players arrived for the Rockets’ quarterfinal games against Grenada on April 27, 2019.

This wasn’t a “first in, last out” situation, though. Aspen Wesley was early because she had to be.

With Kent’s help, Wesley started to stretch, doing all the exercises the doctors had told her to and more. Neshoba Central coach Trae Embry said his senior star did “everything imaginable” to limber up while fighting through the lower back injury that had her in serious pain.

“She was hurting really, really bad that day,” Embry said.

Not bad enough to forgo pitching, though. The Rockets had lost the day before in Grenada and needed to win twice to advance to the MHSAA Class 5A semifinals. In obvious discomfort in the circle, Wesley struck out eight batters as Neshoba Central won Game 2 of the best-of-three series, 4-3.

Before the deciding third game, Embry checked on his ace.

“Are you good?” he asked Wesley.

“No,” she replied, “but I will finish.”

Wesley struck out 11 Charger hitters and even drove in a run at the plate as Neshoba Central cruised to an 11-2 victory. The Rockets swept Lafayette in the semis and Wayne County in the title series, claiming their seventh straight Class 5A title.

It was the sixth consecutive state championship for Wesley, a starter since seventh grade. She was a four-time Mississippi Gatorade Player of the Year, becoming the only softball player to win for four straight seasons in the history of the award.

But she’s put all that success behind her as she prepares for a bigger role in her third season at Mississippi State.

“None of that matters now because I am not the same pitcher,” Wesley said. “This is a whole different ballgame.”

Holes in the hallway

It was cold on the Rez.

That’s where Wesley grew up: on the Choctaw Indian Reservation outside Philadelphia, known to her by its three-letter nickname. She is the first Mississippi Choctaw player in the history of the Southeastern Conference and proud of her Native American heritage.

But Wesley didn’t always have an outlet to practice softball during the winter or when rains lashed her family’s small house on the reservation. So Kent dragged her twin mattress off her bed and painted a box on it with a massive black Sharpie, forming a rudimentary strike zone.

“Alright,” he told his daughter. “Pitch into that.”

Wesley did, propping up the mattress in the narrow hallway every day during the winter. She hit the target. Most of the time.

“I broke so many lightbulbs — so many — and probably put a couple holes in the hallway, too,” Wesley said. “It was all worth it.”

By 2014, when she was still in middle school, Wesley’s work ethic set her apart. She never missed practices and worked a lot on her own to improve her game.

Embry said that was the deciding factor in bringing her up to the varsity team as just a seventh-grader.

“They just kind of threw me out there, and I did what I had to do,” Wesley said. “They just gave me a ball, so I just went and pitched.”

She did more than that in the first of six remarkable high school seasons. At just 13 years old, Wesley put up a 0.69 earned run average and won 19 games in 2014. With uncanny natural movement on her pitches, she struck out more than 200 batters in 121.1 innings.

“We were lucky,” Embry said. “We had other pitchers. But we also knew what we had in her.”

Another level

Two years later, Neshoba Central was at the beach.

The Rockets were facing Harrison Central in the Gulf Coast Classic in Gulfport on Feb. 27, 2016. Embry knew his team had a tough matchup against Red Rebels star sophomore pitcher Kristen Cade, but Wesley was in the circle for his own squad.

“We just knew every day when Aspen stepped on the field that we had a chance,” Embry said.

Just a freshman, Wesley matched Cade inning for inning. Each pitcher tossed up zeros until Wesley scored the winning run in a walk-off victory for Neshoba Central. Cade struck out 11 batters, but Wesley topped her with 14 in a complete-game shutout performance.

“They both just took it to another level,’” Embry said. “You could always say Aspen had another level that she could go to.”

Again and again, Wesley found it. In six seasons with the Rockets, she never put up an ERA higher than her 0.80 mark as an eighth-grader: 0.18 in 2016, 0.77 in 2017, 0.24 in 2018 and 0.23 in 2019. She struck out 1,666 batters in her career — almost two per inning.

That’s to say nothing of Wesley’s skill as a hitter. She broke .400 as a junior and again as a senior, driving in more than 30 runs in each season. She hit nine career home runs.

“This is my 23rd year of coaching, and I’ve never seen it,” said Embry, now in his second season as the head coach at Holmes Community College. “The numbers she put up were unreal, and I was just lucky enough to be the one who got to coach her.”

The No. 86 prospect in the class of 2019 per FloSoftball, Wesley knew for a while where she wanted to take her next step. By her junior year, playing in the state championship series at Mississippi State’s Nusz Park, she was sure.

“Wow,” Wesley thought as she took in the surroundings, “I’m going to play here in a couple years.”

When she signed with the Bulldogs on her 18th birthday — Nov. 29, 2018 — she was much improved from the young pitcher who started out with the Rockets. She had fine-tuned her rise ball — including what Embry called a “low rise” designed to get strikeouts — and developed a good change-up. Along with her screwball and curveball, Wesley had an arsenal that made her ready for the next level.

But it took a while before Mississippi State was ready to cut her loose.

‘She’s ready’

Regardless of her high school achievements, Wesley had to wait her turn in Starkville.

As a freshman, she pitched just 11.1 innings over the course of the Bulldogs’ 28 games before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the season. Wesley showed strikeout stuff, fanning 13 hitters, and she gave up just four runs.

Her role expanded in 2021, but she still pitched the fourth-most innings on the staff. With Annie Willis and Emily Williams earning weekend starts and Alyssa Loza used mostly as a late-inning reliever, Wesley made mostly midweek starts and relief appearances.

She pitched in just nine of Mississippi State’s 24 SEC games, ending up with a 3.20 ERA and 47 strikeouts in 46 innings pitched.

Still, Embry knows Wesley embraced her role behind Willis, Williams and Loza in Starkville. He’d seen her do the same in high school.

“The games that other pitchers pitched, she didn’t sit over there on a bucket in the corner and pout,” he said. “She was the No. 1 person supporting that other pitcher, even though she was not doing anything but batting in that game.”

But Wesley won’t have to take a back seat in 2022. Coach Samantha Ricketts said she and Willis will be “1A and 1B” after Williams chose not to return for an extra year and Loza played her final season in 2021.

“She’s ready,” Ricketts said of Wesley. “I think she’s earned it, she’s worked for it and she’s shown it to us really since the end of last season.”

Taking on that role in the ultra-competitive SEC won’t be easy. Wesley knows that from her experience over the past two years with Mississippi State.

It’s why she knows all those accolades she racked up at Neshoba Central are no longer important.

“It is not high school anymore,” Wesley said. “It is college, and this is a big-time level. It’s different, and I have to keep putting in more work than usual.”

From a tiny hallway on the Rez to the high school field in Philadelphia to Nusz Park in Starkville, Wesley has put in that work. Every time, she’s found success.

So maybe it’s no surprise Embry anticipates Wesley reaching the heights only she can attain.

“That’s what I expect to see at Mississippi State: Once she’s given the ball and given the opportunity, she’s going to go to that other level and really, really, really compete really hard for you,” Embry said.

Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.