The Samantha Story: Chapter Three - Wichita
Brian Ogden, Assistant Director/Communications
7/21/2021
The Samantha Story is a four-part series examining Samantha Ricketts’ journey from All-American to head coach. The third chapter focuses on her first full-time coaching job as an assistant at Wichita State.
STARKVILLE – There was no moment that Samantha Ricketts realized she’d achieved her goal of becoming a collegiate softball coach. No wide-eyed excitement of a dream come true.
When she arrived in Wichita, Kansas, for her first day as the hitting coach for Wichita State, she simply put her head down and got to work. The biggest recruiting trip of the year, heading to Colorado for a series of major tournaments, would be her first trip on staff.
“I honestly don’t even remember that first summer of recruiting because it was such a blur. It was not new to [Shockers head coach] Kristi [Bredbenner], and she did a great job of teaching us.”
But more than learning to recruit, Ricketts’ biggest adjustment would come off the field as she transitioned from a perennial Power Five favorite to the staff of a mid-major. Before her first practice, she remembers wondering who was going to be prepping the field, only to find out that it was one of her responsibilities.
She watched Bredbenner hop on the equipment to drag the field and took notes. There was a grounds crew for gamedays, but for practices, camps and anything else, the field would be Ricketts’ assignment.
“I probably wasn’t the best at it, but I learned,” she said. “I learned to enjoy it and not to just go in a circle. There’s a certain finesse to it.”
On top of dragging the infield, she also ordered and organized all of the Shockers’ equipment. In her first season, the program only had its three coaches. Over time they picked up graduate assistants, managers and a director of operations, but it was far different from the Sooners’ operation at Oklahoma.
“They would give me a hard time because they came from the Division II level about how spoiled I was coming from OU,” Ricketts remembered. “It was good, though. I learned a lot from her, from being in that situation, and having to be so organized because you aren’t just the hitting coach. You’re also an academic advisor, the equipment manager, part-time field crew and camp coordinator. It was learning how to do a lot, but at no point did I not love every minute of it.”
She learned to be a better coach as well. Ricketts had spent the past few years working on her instruction skills at camps and as a graduate assistant, but that was always about implementing someone else’s plan and approach. Now the plan was hers to develop.
“I had always assisted, but I never had to plan and run a practice or a hitting individual or anything like that,” she said. “Kristi was great. She knew that she helped guide me through all of those phases.”
The summer camp sessions became her laboratory. In her first summer, she used the camps as a practice round of practices, planning each week around how she would approach each week with her collegiate hitters in the fall and spring.
“I got to learn how to organize it, and I would almost get to test things out with the lessons before I would try them with my hitters, just a lot of trial and error,” she said.
It worked.
When Ricketts and Bredbenner arrived, the Shockers were coming off a last-place finish in the Missouri Valley Conference. By the time she left, WSU had posted a 21-6 record in conference, won the league’s regular season title and been named the 2014 MVC Coaching Staff of the Year.
That 2014 team set single-season Shockers records for batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, runs, hits, doubles, home runs, RBIs and total bases. Ricketts also saw her first player earn NFCA All-Region honors that year when Cacy Williams was Midwest Region First Team honoree and the first student-athlete in MVC history to receive Player of the Year and Newcomer of the Year honors from the league.
Bredbenner and Ricketts knew that Wichita wasn’t going to be the final stop for the young coach. Coming out of school, Ricketts didn’t feel ready for a Power Five job offer. The plan was always to grow at Wichita, so she could one day take that next step. When the SEC came calling, she couldn’t turn it down.
“I felt confident after three years in the improvement in our numbers and our wins and everything that I thought I was ready for the next challenge,” Ricketts said. “Now let’s see if I can prove myself at the biggest level, and what’s bigger than SEC softball? That was why I think I was intrigued by that one, but I think that was my driving force all along. Let me see if I can prove that I can be a hitting coach in the SEC.”
Ricketts would go on to spend four years as Mississippi State’s hitting coach before being elevated to head coach in the summer of 2018. Today, she is grateful for her Shockers experience because he gives her a greater appreciation for and understanding of her staff.
“It helps knowing a little bit about everything and how it needs to run,” she explained. “If I had no idea the process that goes into ordering Adidas apparel, or Rawlings, or getting the laundry in on time and lugging it over to the other facility to make sure it was washed every day, then you don’t quite grasp the concept of other peoples’ work and the sheer amount of people and help that you have.”
When the time came to leave Kansas, the hardest part was telling her student-athletes that she’d be moving on. This was a group that she had recruited. She told as many of them as she could in person when they came in for individual hitting work. She called the rest.
“I was still close in age to a lot of them too. I was close with them,” she said. “I think it’s always tough, especially if you’re doing it the right way and really building those relationships.”
On July 21, 2014, Ricketts officially made the move to Starkville to begin her career as a Bulldog.