Francesca McBride had already bought the binkies.
The pacifiers — gifts for her nephews — were orange and blue, the school colors of the University of Florida. McBride, a tall, smooth right-side hitter, had been committed to play volleyball for the Gators since her sophomore year at Troy High School in the Detroit Area, and she was fully faithful in her choice.
“I was just ready,” McBride said.
But during her junior year, she felt that opportunity was abruptly taken away, leaving McBride shocked and disappointed. Cautiously, she reopened her recruitment, looking for a school whose word she could trust.
Enter Mississippi State, who’d recruited McBride under former head coach David McFatrich and showed interest again.
“I was like, ‘It must be fate if this is the second time around,'” McBride said.
In the Bulldogs, the Michigan native found her second chance. She signed to Mississippi State in November and enrolled in January, leaving high school a semester early to ingrain herself in Starkville. And she’s poised to bring her unique talent to the floor when the Bulldogs’ season starts Oct. 17 at the Newell-Grissom Building.
“When we look at Fran, we just see potential for a player that this program has never had before, and that’s really exciting,” head coach Julie Darty Dennis said.
A Gator no more
Right away, McBride knew the phone call was serious.
She knew she “didn’t do so hot” at the Triple Crown NIT in February 2019 in Kansas City, and the uncharacteristic performance had her worried.
“I was definitely not at my best,” McBride admitted.
So a week later, when the call came in, McBride knew what Florida coach Mary Wise would say: It would be best if McBride decommitted from Florida. She did.
“She put everything she had into, ‘I’m going to be a Florida Gator,'” Darty Dennis said. “She was completely, 100 percent all in, and for that to be taken from her, she was heartbroken.”
McBride picked Florida because of the Gators’ coach, their facilities and their recent success. In 30 years under Wise, Florida has won 24 Southeastern Conference championships, including 18 straight from 1991 to 2008. The Gators have made the NCAA Final Four eight times, reaching the title match in 2017 — the year McBride committed to play in Gainesville.
“I knew that if I went there that I’d be pushed to my greatest potential,” she said.
But suddenly, that was no longer an option. McBride said her family was just as disappointed as she was, and together, they dealt with the shock of the decision.
“It was really tough for me,” McBride said. “Just being in high school, you never want to feel that type of rejection.”
She reopened her recruitment, feeling vulnerable. But her talent still shined through.
At a tournament in the Midwest the following month, a Big Ten head coach spotted McBride. He asked Darty Dennis to come watch ‘the most exceptional blocker (he’d) ever seen,” and the Bulldogs coach obliged.
“Do you need a right-side?” the coach asked Darty Dennis.
“Actually,” she said, “we do.”
A heart-to-heart
As the sirens blared and McBride hunkered down in her Starkville hotel room, her mom wasn’t moving.
Raised in the Midwest’s Tornado Alley, Shelia McBride was unafraid of the funnel cloud that threatened to wreak devastation on the city. Her daughter, who had never experienced a tornado in Michigan, was. She wanted to hide in the bathtub and wait.
“‘Mom, we need to go into the bathroom,” McBride insisted.
“We’re fine,” her mother replied.
Eventually, the sirens powered off. No tornado came to tear the hotel apart. But it was still an inauspicious introduction to Starkville for McBride and her family on her official visit to Mississippi State over “Super Bulldog Weekend” in April 2019. Besides surviving the storm, McBride took in women’s tennis matches against Texas A&M and LSU, a three-game baseball series against Alabama, a soccer exhibition against Auburn and the football team’s spring game.
“Somehow, we still pieced together a decent visit for her and her mom,” Darty Dennis said.
Credit former Mississippi State women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer with an assist, too. At the Atlanta airport for the flight into Starkville, Schaefer and the McBrides ran into each other and struck up a conversation. The coach extolled the virtues of Mississippi State to McBride and her mother.
“Of course, he saw a (6-foot-4) girl and was like, ‘What are you doing?'” Darty Dennis said.
Whether it was Schaefer’s words or what she saw on her visit, McBride liked Mississippi State. Her experience with Florida didn’t make it easy for her to trust college coaches, but Darty Dennis helped put her anxieties at ease.
“Fran and I have had an immediate connection since our first phone call,” the coach said. “I think she knows I’m open, I’m honest, I’m going to be real and vulnerable with them, and that’s what she was looking for.”
One night, McBride, her mom and Darty Dennis had an emotional “heart-to-heart” about the recruitment process.
“I let her know how I was feeling with the decommitment and everything like that,” McBride said. “I was just bawling my eyes out and everything. It was a very important moment for me and us as a player-coach relationship.”
The next day, McBride decided to commit to Mississippi State.
A second chance
McBride, her new coach said, always planned to enroll early with the Bulldogs.
Darty Dennis doesn’t always recommend graduating a semester early and cutting a recruit’s high school career short, but McBride was devoted to becoming “fully immersed” in Starkville as soon as she could. She came back to campus in June after the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone home, and she hasn’t left since.
“She’s just really all in,” Darty Dennis said. “It’s not like she’s looking for the next weekend she can come home. She wants to be here. She wants to get good. She wants to get stronger. It’s really refreshing to have somebody who understands that going away to college really means going away to college.”
Living in the dorms, McBride has already cultivated a diverse group of friends who play other sports at Mississippi State — Taylor Middlebrook on the softball team; Olivia Simpson, Sydney Strunk and Elle McCaslin on the soccer team; and Madison Hayes and Rickea Jackson on the women’s basketball team. The group is regionally different — for example, Middlebrook is from Georgia, McCaslin is from Illinois, and Hayes is from Tennessee — but they’re still close.
“When we’re all together, we still kind of relate to each other in some ways,” McBride said.
Of course, she has a lot more in common with Jackson and Hayes than most volleyball players do. Officially listed at 6-foot-3, McBride is tied with N.C. State transfer Jessica Kemp for the station of tallest player on the team.
Height has been something Darty Dennis, in her third year coaching at Mississippi State, has prioritized in recruiting, but she said it’s not the end-all, be-all in forecasting a player’s success.
“I don’t want to bring in a 6’7″ player if they can’t jump or move well on the court,” Darty Dennis said.
McBride’s “long levers” and smooth movements certainly dispel that concern. Darty Dennis said she has similarities to several all-American players in her build and her arm swing.
“She’s not just tall,” Darty Dennis said. “She moves really, really well.”
Although McBride’s talent is profuse, her coach knows it might not immediately show this fall. With a spring shortened by COVID-19 and a regular-season schedule of just eight games — all Southeastern Conference contests — the conditions aren’t ideal for a new player to thrive right off the bat.
“Fran’s a freshman,” Darty Dennis said. “When she steps on the court for the first time in that jersey, it’s not going to go perfect, and if it does, then the next day there might be something because she’s a freshman and she’s never played at this level before.”
But the coach remains optimistic, and so is McBride. The freshman said she’s excited for the season to come — a new opportunity to succeed.
“It took a lot in me to just keep going after all that,” she said. “I’m really glad that I was given this second chance and that I have the strength now to just be the best I can be.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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