STARKVILLE — If nothing else, Julie Darty’s first roster as Mississippi State’s volleyball coach is a diverse one.
It will feature seven freshmen she helped secure in between the time she took the job and now, plus three players that came with her from Jacksonville University, leaving just eight spots for the Bulldogs of last season. Entering the preseason, they were three sects with different levels of understanding of the Darty experience.
Darty sees no divides forming along those lines. If anything, those lines are disappearing in time for the season’s beginning.
MSU will open its season by hosting the Starkvegas Classic with Friday matches against Mississippi Valley State (11 a.m., SEC Network+) and ULM (7 p.m., SEC Network+). It expects to present a united front.
“I think the locker room culture, I’m not worried about any cliques or girl-on-girl drama,” Darty said. “I think when the enemy is on the other side of the net, we’re going to attack mode even more than when it’s each other on the other side of the net.”
The three transfers that followed Darty’s path from Jacksonville to MSU are junior middle blocker Amarrah Cooks, junior setter Alleah Stamatis and sophomore libero Kendall Murr. All of them earned All-Atlantic Sun Conference honors of some kind in their time as Dolphins, but in the first year of the Darty era at MSU, their impact will be greater than their on-court production.
“I think having three transfers come in with me helped the others get to know me better,” Darty said. “They get to see what my relationship with them is going to look like if you give me time. For me, I can stop having to try so hard and I can be myself; they can tell other girls, ‘This is normal, when she makes that face this is what it means.’ They helped.
“I was more worried about the JU girls being isolated, and being the JU girls and everybody else, than they were.”
Some of that unease subsided for Darty when she had the three of them on their initial visit to Starkville, watching them interact with the players they would ultimately join. For the transfers themselves, any lingering doubts subsided once they got on the court with their new teammates.
“We all really want to go forward with our program. We’re all on the same page,” Stamatis said. “We didn’t want to be the JU girls. We wanted to be this team.”
Stamatis added getting to know their new teammates on the court first helped them grow together off of it. In the fall, the freshmen got to experience the same sensation.
“I could tell from the first practice we all wanted the same exact thing. We all wanted to change something about the program,” freshman middle blocker Deja Robinson said. “We all showed each other that’s what we wanted to do.”
As the transfers and freshmen came together, it was a group of 10 mixing into what eight returnees had already established. Darty made the transition easy for them all with conversations on the front end and a no-nonsense spring practice session, preparing them for the the incoming 10 already knew.
“I made it very clear that I’m willing to rerecruit you and get to know you, but if you don’t want to play for me, that’s not going to hurt my feelings if you say you didn’t sign up for this,” Darty said. “That honesty and that dialogue is what people like about me.
“I wanted all 18 of them to look at me like, ‘That’s my coach.'”
By all accounts, that mission has been accomplished. Darty still worries how the locker room will react as the season wears on and adversity comes. In the final 48 hours before the season starts, Stamatis and Robinson have no such concerns.
It helps that they have a common vision to unite around.
“Winning. We want to win,” Stamatis said.
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter @Brett_Hudson
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 43 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.