Riley Hull wanted to get closer to her future teammates.
Around a year after the Pulaski County (Kentucky) High School softball star announced her commitment to Mississippi State in September 2017, she set about reaching her fellow recruits in the class of 2021, hoping to build connections with the players with whom she would soon be taking the field.
She formed a group chat with fellow Bulldog pledges Sydney Carter of Lassiter High School in Marietta, Georgia, who had committed in the summer of 2017 before her freshman year of high school, and Saleyna Daniel of Stratford High School in Houston, Texas, who committed in January of 2018. Briana Bower of Huntley, Illinois, joined the group when she committed in September 2019; Leilani Pulemau of Carson, California, came into the fold this January.
“Since we’re all from different states, we don’t get a chance to really see each other,” Pulemau said.
But last week, Hull found a way to bring the five future Bulldogs together — even if they couldn’t physically meet due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. She had stumbled across a TikTok video from a high school in her area that showed players pretending to catch a ball from the teammate before them and “passing” it to the next person.
“I saw it and was like, ‘OK, we’ve gotta put our own twist to this,'” Hull said.
So she took it upon herself to act as director, imploring her fellow commits to “‘do something random” — as Carter recalled — as they caught the ball on the left side of the screen and dumped it off to the right.
Pulemau went first, lifting off the pink coverlet on her bed as she caught a throw from her younger brother offscreen — something that took at least 10 tries to get the timing down, she said — before tossing the ball to the side.
“It was really cute,” she said of the video. “I loved it.”
Hull, who said she was “fake gardening” with shears on a bush in front of her house, needed help to “catch” Pulemau’s toss.
“‘Mom, just throw me this ball and you can go back inside,'” Hull told her mom, who had come out on the front porch, before throwing the ball into a bush offscreen and having to climb in to get it.
It was a light moment during a suspended season that Hull said has been “really boring.” She’s taken the stoppage to “work on herself,” while Pulemau and her brother have resorted to running short-hop drills in their garage with no high school or travel ball softball to compete in.
Daniel, who caught a softball from her dad to follow Hull’s lead in the video, said being unable to play has been “very frustrating.”
Wearing a smile and a long-sleeved maroon Mississippi State shirt, though, she showed no signs of that frustration, adjusting the guitar she was holding — Daniel doesn’t play guitar, but the instrument was at hand in her room — to catch the ball and throw it at a nearby chair.
“I haven’t even met them yet in person,” Daniel said, “but they seem like awesome people.”
Her throw was “caught” by Bower, who was slumped over in bed as the ball nestled into the glove on her right hand. Still “asleep,” she flung the ball away.
Carter, who was vacuuming her silver 2001 Nissan Pathfinder, caught the throw from her dad, who had just gotten home from work.
The junior, who had recruiting interest from South Carolina, Georgia, Michigan State and other schools, said that when she came to Starkville she “could tell it was the right place.”
She and Hull cited the “family atmosphere” the Bulldogs take pride in as a reason they committed, with Hull saying the team has a mentality that “everybody’s in this together.”
For Carter, the video Hull posted in full to Twitter on Thursday — which garnered positive reactions from Mississippi State head coach Samantha Ricketts, Hull’s high school coach and others — was just proof that when she joins the team in 2021, she’ll already have at least four friends on her side.
“It’s a nice feeling to know you have people there,” Carter said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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