STARKVILLE — The Mississippi State volleyball team’s season was spiraling out of control.
Whether it was the players’ body language or the looks on their faces, coach David McFatrich could tell something drastic needed to be done to snap the Bulldogs out of their tailspin.
First, though, McFatrich needed to push his players even deeper, so he went into the locker room following a 3-2 loss to Auburn and “blew brains.” For a coach who is apt to break out the word “gnarly” to describe the skills of one of his players, “blew brains” means he got madder than he ever has in his life. His goal was to shift his players’ focus from losing to him.
“I walked out of there thinking, ‘Does that help us hit bottom?’ ” McFatrich said.
McFatrich said the team returned the next morning for a practice that was “unbelievable.” MSU lost to regular-season champion Texas A&M 3-0 the next day, but it played with the heart, soul, and grit McFatrich has come to expect.
From there, MSU won three of its last four matches, including a victory against Ole Miss, that helped it finish 17-15 and record the program’s first winning record since 2006.
“It kind of united us,” MSU junior libero/defensive specialist Payton Harris said. “It wasn’t against him, but it brought us together because we didn’t want to hear him scream against us again, so we have to get it together.”
McFatrich, Harris, and the rest of the Bulldogs hope that momentum continues this season. The team started practice Saturday in preparation for its season opener against 2015 national semifinalist Kansas at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 26, at the Newell-Grissom Building. The match is a part of the two-day, four-team Bulldog Invitational that also will include Lamar and Eastern Washington.
McFatrich has a track record for being able to build programs. He directed Central Arkansas to NCAA tournament appearances in two of his four seasons as head coach. In his first season at the Southland Conference member school, he led the team to a 17-15 finish. In his second year, Central Arkansas went 30-5 and advanced to the NCAA tournament.
MSU hopes it can follow the same path to record its first bid to the NCAA tournament.
“We definitely got our foot in the door (last season),” MSU senior middle blocker/right-side hitter Jazmyne Johnson said. “There were a lot of times when Fatch told us afterward, ‘Such and such coach couldn’t believe how hard we played,’ or ‘We are going to be great.’ I think a lot of the girls got tired if hearing, ‘We are going to be great’ because we knew what we could be.
“For me, we just hit a road block. Our season was going up, up, up, but it got to the point when we were losing and we didn’t know how to fix it.”
Johnson, Harris, and McFatrich said MSU easily could have won at least five more matches to push it well past the 20-win mark. Johnson said making that amount of improvement won’t be enough this season because she knows the team’s potential. Besides, she already has taken to breaking down team huddles with the word “tournament” to signify the goal everyone has of playing in the NCAAs for the first time.
To do that, McFatrich said the team will have to avoid skids like the four- and five-game losing streaks it suffered last season. In each stretch, MSU suffered a 3-2 loss (against Tennessee and Auburn) in a match it led 2-0.
McFatrich said he sat on the bench for an inordinate amount of time after the loss to Auburn in Starkville. He said he felt the team hadn’t hit bottom, so he asked himself what he could do to help it get there. He hit his two fists together to give an example of the dynamic within the team at that point, so he knew he had to do something to change the trajectory.
MSU’s path changed following a loss to South Carolina and wins against Georgia and LSU. It then broke out to a 2-0 lead against Ole Miss in its regular-season finale. The Rebels rallied, just like McFatrich anticipated, to take the fourth set. He said he cautioned his players that Ole Miss had the confidence and felt that if it won the first game after intermission that it could come all the way back to win.
MSU didn’t let it happen.
A season-punctuating kill by Evie Grace Singleton gave the Bulldogs a 25-23 victory.
“The coolest part of the entire season was that was the best game we played all year,” McFatrich said. “We made some mistakes, but it is 24-23 us and they’re serving. We pass and didn’t get a good swing, but it came right back over on one and it went to Jazmyne. She set the ball and the ball goes back, so Blossom (Sato) is setting away from 15-17 feet off the net. Evie Grace swings from about seven feet off the net. She has a swing on the ball like she didn’t give a crap. She blasted that mother.”
The 17 wins marked the most for MSU since 2006, while the six Southeastern Conference wins were the most since winning seven conference games in 2011.
MSU also snapped a six-match losing streak to Ole Miss with a 3-0 victory in Oxford. The Bulldogs’ second victory against the Rebels helped them close the season with three-straight SEC wins, the first time MSU has won three-straight league matches since 2007. The second win against Ole Miss gave MSU its first back-to-back wins against the Rebels since 2009.
Harris said there is no denying the success of 2015 sets the table for an even bigger showing this season. A year ago, she said MSU was so accustomed to losing that it was surprised when it started to win and didn’t know how to maintain that momentum. She doesn’t feel that will be an issue this season.
“I think there is always that little bit of pressure we always have on ourselves that we had a really good season last year, but that wasn’t good enough,” Harris said. “There were a lot of games we felt like we didn’t finish.”
Johnson agrees and doesn’t want to go back to the program’s sub-.500 ways. In fact, she said she doesn’t want the team’s last scheduled regular-season match be its final one of 2016, which is why she is doing her best to keep everyone focused on the goal of making the NCAA tournament.
If the 2015 team was the one to put its foot in the door to create an opening, Johnson wants the 2016 squad to be the one that breaks through and does damage.
“They know they started the tradition,” Johnson said, referring to last season’s team. “We did that, now what is next? It is the tournament. There isn’t anything after that. It hurt to see how the season ended, but there were a lot of perks to it. I think the city of Starkville and the state of Mississippi knew who Mississippi State volleyball was. I can’t say that they did before I got here because I wasn’t here, but to walk into places and hear them say, ‘Oh, you’re on the Mississippi State volleyball team,’ that was special.
“I have been saying it is not our job to wake everybody up who has been sleeping on us. We are just going to go out and do what we have got to do. When it happens, we will love all of the talk.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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