Taylor Middlebrook is ready to forge her own path.
In November, when the star infielder from Douglasville, Georgia, signed to play softball at Mississippi State, she listed her intended major as marketing. That’s no longer the plan.
Middlebrook’s mother Marcia is a surgical technologist at WellStar Douglas Hospital, and the Alexander High School senior has always been partial to the medical field. So she decided on a new major for her time in Starkville: biological sciences, along the pre-med track.
But Middlebrook wants to work with babies, she said, as she hopes to carve out her own niche rather than follow her mom’s trail.
“I feel like this year, I really became my own person and figured out what I actually want to do,” Middlebrook said.
The slick-fielding, versatile infielder is awaiting the start of her collegiate career, and the mentality she espoused will likely serve her well on a skilled — and crowded — Bulldogs roster.
Mississippi State went 25-3 before its season ended due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and the NCAA recently ruled that all 23 Bulldogs are entitled to an extra year of eligibility. Four of the team’s five seniors are set to come back, along with Middlebrook’s fellow 2020 signees: Addison Purvis and Kylie Taylor.
That’s a lot of returning talent — but Middlebrook, who said she could see herself starting right away, isn’t fazed.
“(C)oming in, it’s gonna be a fight,” she said. “I feel like it doesn’t really matter. The best of the best should play.”
Based on her high school resume, the incoming freshman can list herself in that elite group. She hit .589 with 12 home runs in her sophomore season at Chapel Hill High School in Douglasville and opened her junior season with four homers and nine doubles in just her first 10 games at Alexander.
But it’s Middlebrook’s defensive skills that helped her earn all-state honors three times and garner a No. 42 ranking on Extra Inning Softball’s 2020 prospect list.
“Taylor is a smooth-fielding infielder with a great glove that can play middle infield as well as third base,” Mississippi State coach Samantha Ricketts said in a press release when Middlebrook signed with the Bulldogs. “She is athletic with great speed and has a knack for coming up with clutch hits on the biggest stages. She has definitely shown that she is the type of hitter you want up with the game on the line against some of the nation’s best pitchers.”
Middlebrook told The Dispatch that she chose Mississippi State over LSU, Arkansas and other interested schools, citing the Bulldogs’ “family-based program.”
“The coaches have a relationship with the players,” she said. “I felt like I could talk to my coach about anything other than softball. That’s really what was most important to me during my recruitment process.”
Middlebrook committed to Mississippi State when she was a freshman at Chapel Hill and Vann Stuedeman headed up the Bulldogs, but when Stuedeman and the school parted ways last summer, Middlebrook was uncertain of who would replace her.
“I was kind of scared in between, not knowing if coach Ricketts was gonna be the coach or not,” she said. “I’m actually really glad that coach Ricketts got the job.”
This spring, as Ricketts excelled in her first year at the helm, Middlebrook was watching. She bought a FloSoftball account to watch tournament games on her iPad, and she even made a few trips to Starkville — roughly three and a half hours away — to watch early-season games at Nusz Park.
“I love watching it, but it’s like, ‘I want to be out there, too,'” Middlebrook said.
She bonded with current Mississippi State freshmen Kiki Edwards, Desiree Lewis and Madisyn Kennedy — the Bulldogs’ starter at shortstop this season — from their time together in the Birmingham Thunderbolts travel ball organization.
With the players — who are “like sisters,” she said — Middlebrook shared the highs of the best season in school history and the lows of its abrupt and devastating end.
“They all worked so hard this offseason,” she said. “They truly deserved to finish out, and I feel like they would have finished out on top.”
She’ll come to campus in the fall, expecting her time at Mississippi State to be “fun, challenging (and) different” — and hoping for even more success in 2021 than the Bulldogs enjoyed this spring.
“We were set up this year, and we’re gonna be really set up next year,” she said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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