As we continue Throwback Thursday, we reach into the video vault of CWS247 (our former name) for a feature called "The Ladies of College Baseball." As the interview highlights, ladies play a significant role in the world of college baseball, both in fandom and the actual administration and support of the sport and its games.
Our own Clara Fuller delivers another great interview, following on the heels of Superfan "Maroon Mary" Barrett, as she sits down last year at the iconic Strange Brew Coffeehouse in Starkville, MS, to interview Diamond Girl Avery Braddock. Braddock herself has deep roots both to Mississippi State, a family replete with MSU grads, and to her role as a Diamond Girl, having served as a baseball team manager in high school. In addition to being a Diamond Girl, she was also selected Miss MSU 2022 in campus elections this past fall and presented to the crowd at the 2022 Homecoming Weekend football game.
While such a group as the Diamond Girls is quite common now in college baseball, it wasn't that way back in the mid-1970s when Mississippi State Head Baseball Coach Ron Polk, working with baseball-savvy female students just like Avery, put together one of the first such programs. Bat and equipment attendants have been around for decades in baseball, but one can only imagine the surprise of an opposing coach who brought their team into Dudy Noble Field back in those days and saw a couple of the Diamond Girls stationed just outside the visiting team dugout, to collect discarded bats and retrieve foul balls off the home plate screen. Legend even has it that a certain coach, a bit wary as to what the Diamond Girls might overhear in strategic conversations in his dugout, actually sought out for the next day his own representative (rumored to be a player's girlfriend) that was utilized for the remaining games of the weekend conference series.
Take a look and listen, as College Baseball Central brings you "The Ladies of College Baseball."
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