The Samantha Story: Chapter Two - Akron
Brian Ogden, Assistant Director/Communications
7/15/2021
The Samantha Story is a four-part series examining Samantha Ricketts' journey from All-American to head coach. The second chapter looks at the impact of her professional career with the Akron Racers of National Pro Fastpitch.
STARKVILLE – When Samantha Ricketts stepped on the field for her first professional game, she found herself in a league she could have only dreamed of. Around the country, National Pro Fastpitch teams included Olympians and former collegiate stars.
She would face American legends Monica Abbott, Cat Osterman and Jennie Finch. Crystl Bustos shared the same dugout with her. And Jessica Mendoza and Natasha Watley were another pair of names with Olympic fame across the diamond.
“It’s such a cool experience to be able to share the field with these women that you grew up watching play,” Ricketts said. “Now you’re becoming friends with them on and off the field and competing against the best.”
Following her collegiate career at Oklahoma, Ricketts was drafted 12th overall by the Akron Racers in 2009. The draft was different then. There was no broadcast, no watch parties, no social media campaign. Instead, Ricketts looked up the results online and saw she and a teammate were bound for Ohio that summer.
“At the time, the NPF was really growing,” she remembered. “Knowing that I was coming back to Norman to get my masters and be a graduate assistant and still be in school, it seemed like the perfect way to spend a couple of summers.”
So Ricketts packed her bags and headed to Ohio for the summers of 2009 and 2010. What she found was a challenging environment that was far different from her collegiate experience. Gone were the days of strict structure with scheduled practices and mandatory workouts. This was going to be whatever she made of it.
She bought a city gym pass and headed downtown to workout like anyone else. Mondays were the team’s off days and Tuesdays were the only official practices. The rest of the week was spent competing.
“You had to manage your time, like you did in college, but now a little bit better,” she said. “You knew what you were doing was for the betterment of the team, but now no one was making you go. It was your choice.”
Ricketts would wake up early on game days to make it to optional hitting workouts, knowing it was the only chance she had to get in the cages throughout the week.
When she wasn’t working out, practicing or playing games, Ricketts got one of her first tastes of coaching and teaching. The Racers and the city of Akron would host large youth tournaments that also offered camps for the teams coming to town. The Racers would spend the morning teaching at camps for the children then go watch their tournament games. In the evenings, the kids got the opportunity to return the favor and pack the stands for the NPF club.
“It was really fun for us because we had full crowds all the time. I think we probably had the best attendance out of anybody in that league at the time,” Ricketts said. “It was a lot of young players, and it’s funny, as I’ve moved on to coaching, some of them would send me pictures where they were seven or eight years old taking pictures outside of the Akron stadium.”
While in Akron, she played with Trena Peel, who now coaches at Iowa. Peel was always taking notes in the dugout or at practice. Ricketts decided it would be good for her to do the same, so she bought a notebook and filled it with coaching ideas she picked up from those around her.
When the pro club’s offseason came around Ricketts would return to Norman to attend graduate school and continue learning under head coach Patty Gasso as a graduate assistant. She credits that time, coupled with her time on her own in the summers, for helping her develop into the coach she is today.
Ricketts had two hitting coaches in her time playing with the Sooners: Howard Dobson, who is now at LSU, and Tripp MacKay, the head coach at Kennesaw State. The two of them had an enormous impact on Ricketts’ approach to teaching hitting.
Dobson emphasized the individual. He focused on what worked for each unique hitter, what felt right and made them comfortable. He spent time getting to know his hitters and his relational approach can still be seen in the way Ricketts approaches her players today.
MacKay had a background in giving lessons and his focus was on the mechanics and physics behind the swing.
“Coach MacKay and I probably butted heads a little bit more when he got there,” Ricketts said. “I’d been an All-American, and he came in and said, ‘You’re swinging wrong. We’re going to change your swing.’ And I said no, or maybe why.”
Ricketts never made the changes he’d asked for during her Sooner career, but two years after he arrived in Norman he walked into the batting cages to find a surprise. There was Ricketts getting in a last workout before heading back to Akron and the NPF.
“You do it now!” he said, somewhat exasperated that she had finally chosen to listen.
“I finally got it. I finally started to understand what he was talking about and the why behind the swing mechanics and how it worked and applied to every swing,” she remembered. “It took that long and that maturing process and I think listening to him constantly teach for me to understand how it would benefit.”
The 2010 campaign saw Ricketts play in 46 games. She hit four home runs in her final professional season before a three-game postseason run.
Once Akron was eliminated, Ricketts knew it was time to move on.
“I enjoyed it, but I think after two years I was ready to find a coaching job,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to continue to do. It just didn’t really fit with what my goals were to continue playing after two years.”
She returned to Norman for her second season as a graduate assistant and began to focus on finding a coaching job. The next summer while working camps at Oklahoma, she saw an assistant coach position open at Wichita State. After mentioning the job to Gasso, her former head coach made a phone call to newly-hired Shockers head coach Kristi Bredbenner.
By the end of June, Ricketts had landed her “big girl job” and was on the road for her first recruiting trip.