During NCAA baseball regionals, Samantha Ricketts surveyed Dudy Noble Field with one thought.
“How do you lose when your atmosphere is like this?” the Mississippi State softball coach wondered.
In the MSU baseball team’s case, you don’t. Not often, anyway. The Bulldogs went 30-9 at home and 5-1 in the postseason at their home stadium, earning a trip to Omaha, Nebraska. There, they brought home Mississippi State’s first team national title in any sport with thousands of fans in attendance at TD Ameritrade Park.
And Ricketts knows precisely what created the type of atmosphere capable of setting NCAA attendance records, which MSU did this season in Super Regionals against Notre Dame.
“It’s a credit to being consistent and being good all the time,” she said.
Ricketts’ own program still has a ways to go to get to that point. The Bulldogs have finished over .500 in each of the past five seasons, but relative to the daunting Southeastern Conference, MSU is still toward the bottom. Ricketts’ team was picked to finish 12th out of 13 SEC programs this season.
Of course, even finishing toward the bottom of the SEC is impressive on a national level. As the No. 9 seed in the conference tournament in 2021, the Bulldogs made an NCAA regional as the No. 2 seed. They won two games but lost twice to regional host Oklahoma State, which went on to make the Women’s College World Series.
This season, Mississippi State is aiming higher. Pitcher Aspen Wesley said the team’s goal is not only to make a regional but to win it and reach Super Regionals for the first time in program history.
Hosting a regional would also be a step forward for a Bulldogs program that has never accomplished the feat since the SEC began sponsoring softball in 1997. While MSU can’t quite cram more than 14,000 people into Nusz Park, Ricketts and her staff will do their best.
“That’s our goal: to provide that type of atmosphere — on a smaller scale on a softball field,” Ricketts said.
Nusz Park — originally the MSU Softball Field but upgraded and renamed in 2016 — holds 1,000 chairback seats, but there is room for plenty more fans around the outfield wall. Mississippi State has made upgrades over the course of the offseason in hopes of drawing increased attendance. The school expanded its wooden deck in the outfield to allow more spectators to peer in and replaced the lights around the stadium, allowing for LED light shows when the moment is right. Promotions like handing out trading cards of the Bulldogs’ best players all time are also aimed to draw fans.
Unfortunately, though, there are always obstacles.
“A lot of people don’t know are games are free,” Ricketts said.
Some fans choose sports like men’s basketball and baseball over softball. An 0-13 start to SEC play in 2021 couldn’t have helped things.
But when COVID-19 attendance restrictions loosened later in the spring, Ricketts saw firsthand the impact of a rowdy crowd. Fans flocked to Nusz Park in greater numbers as Mississippi State closed the regular season on a seven-game winning streak — including five straight games in Starkville — before winning its SEC tournament opener.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we went on that 8-0 run when our stadium opened back up,” Ricketts said.
Ricketts had a similar streak in her first season as head coach when Mississippi State went 25-3 in 2020 before the pandemic. The Bulldogs won 17 straight games between the 2020 and 2021 seasons.
A former star at Oklahoma before becoming an assistant at MSU in 2015, Ricketts has put the Bulldogs’ program “on the map,” catcher Mia Davidson said.
Davidson, entering her fifth and final college season, has tried to do the same.
“I think just making sure people appreciate softball as a sport at Mississippi State,” she said when asked about her impact on the school. “Yeah, we’re a baseball, football, women’s basketball (school), but just being able to let people know that Mississippi State has a growing and successful program is really something special here.”
It’s especially important when it comes to growing the sport in Mississippi, where softball at a high school level still has room for improvement. Only two of the Bulldogs’ 24 players are from the Magnolia State: pitcher Aspen Wesley (Neshoba Central) and infielder Aquana Brownlee (Houston High School).
“Mississippi has a lot of talent; it’s just a matter of getting them seen,” said Trae Embry, Wesley’s high school coach for the Rockets and the current head coach at Holmes Community College.
In Mississippi, more and more players are picking softball over other sports, and the best players are increasingly able to play club ball at home rather than crossing state lines to do it.
Ricketts said she’s glad to see softball growing on a national stage as well. More and more games are televised: The Bulldogs will have 10 games shown on the SEC Network this season. Last summer, the WCWS in Oklahoma City drew more TV viewers than the men’s event in Omaha.
Now, Mississippi State hopes to expand its presence in a burgeoning sport.
“It’s an exciting time to play softball at a national level as well as in the state,” Ricketts said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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