Mississippi State softball is coming off its best season in program history, and Samantha Ricketts, now entering her fourth season as the head coach in Starkville, has the keys to the castle for an ever-evolving Bulldogs team.
Ricketts spoke at the Rotary Club of Columbus on Tuesday about the heights that this program has been taken to and what has come from it, like the new $7 million, 12,000-square-foot facility being built alongside Nusz Park.
That success is due in large part to how the players have bought into the culture that Ricketts has created, starting on the recruiting trail when these players are in high school.
However, a massive new facility to rival the one that Mississippi State baseball has over at the Palmeiro Center and Dudy Noble Field doesn’t hurt to have around.
“The thing I’m most excited about is just the investment it shows from our administration in our program,” Ricketts said. “… It’s a belief in the program, in the coaching staff and in the team in what we’re doing with our future. To be able to have that to help with recruiting as well as our development with everyone coming in is going to be really great for our future.”
The Bulldogs are coming off of their first NCAA Super Regional appearance, knocking off the No. 2 national seed, Florida State, in the process on the road in Tallahassee, Florida.
Mississippi State won 37 games in 2022 and continues to hold expectations high moving forward with a belief of continued success and in confidence that it can continue to make these strides.
The recruiting trail has been exactly how MSU has done that, but the model of how to do it has changed in recent years.
“It used to be in softball, typical to how it is in baseball, that we could recruit as young as we wanted,” Ricketts said. “We were recruiting in the eighth grade and freshman year of high school, and it was not fun. You were recruiting parents more than you were recruiting the players.”
With recent changes to this now limiting contact between schools and players until Sept. 1 of a player’s junior year in high school, summer prospect camps help out in the process.
MSU continues to strive to mostly fill its roster through recruiting, but Ricketts and the program know the importance of the transfer portal.
However, they believe in the success of youth and high school recruiting, so players added via the transfer portal amount to just a few every season.
“We don’t typically recruit too heavy from it,” Ricketts said. “We believe a lot in our recruiting at the youth level and our development, so we’re maybe recruiting one or two kids out of the portal a year to fill some holes.”
What the portal was originally intended for — players sitting out a year in order to transfer to another school — has essentially turned into free agency, where players can scope out programs left and right with the ability to be immediately eligible.
That’s even more so illuminated with the NCAA’s recent stance on name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, where players can now monetize themselves, which can influence how a school can go after them.
“The landscape of the NCAA right now is ever changing,” Ricketts said. “Everything from NIL to the transfer portal. It has made coaching very different and playing very different even than it was not too long ago, really in the last five years.”
The Bulldogs have participated in NIL-related deals, but as Ricketts talked about, players have done things more for what the agreement was intended to be: using one’s name, image and likeness for hometown camps or to partner with local businesses to sell specialized merchandise.
Those who move in the transfer portal can be offered money through NIL to go there, making it essentially like college free agency. Knowing where it’s gone, things have blown up beyond what anyone thought.
“We like more of the community level,” Ricketts said. “I think it really fits in well around here, and it’s been fun to see how the community has rallied behind our program.”
MSU has decided to approach these things in its own unique way, and it’s paid off tremendously as the program has gotten better in each of the three years with Ricketts at the helm.
After last season’s success, reaching and hosting a Super Regional, expectations are high heading into the fall practice and in the months leading up to the spring.
The Bulldogs are a battle-tested program and will continue to play the best of the best moving forward to best prepare themselves for a tough slate of Southeastern Conference softball this coming season.
MSU created a buzz in Starkville and made itself known in the college softball world in 2022, and Ricketts and the program look to do that and more in 2023 and beyond.
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