Points of Pride
Athletics
The men's basketball Bulldogs won the 2009 Southeastern Conference Tournament Championship in March. Mississippi State's student-athletes concluded the recently completed 2008 spring semester with a combined 2.98 grade-point average, the highest single semester all-sport GPA ever recorded by the university's men and women athletes. Additionally, State's football team and women's basketball team earned their program's highest grade point averages ever, a 2.72 and 3.26, respectively.
All of MSU's 16 varsity sports surpassed the minimum Academic Progress Rate for the 2007-08 academic year. All but one has exceeded the NCAA-mandated 925 ratio for the four-year period.
Mississippi State's Diamond Dogs competed in the College World Series for the eighth time in school history in 2007. The Bulldogs last played on college baseball's biggest stage after the 1998 season.
In July 2007, Mississippi State softball head coach Jay Miller helped lead the U.S. Junior National team to the Gold Medal in the eighth annual Junior Women's World Championships in Enschede, The Netherlands. The victory capped off a perfect 11-0 record for the Americans and marks their first Gold Medal since 1995.
In 2009, the basketball Bulldogs won the Southeastern Conference Tournament championship and advanced to NCAA play.
Mississippi State junior catcher Edward Easley added the biggest award of his career to an already impressive list when he was recipient of the 2007 Coleman Company Johnny Bench Award as the nation's top collegiate catcher. Easley became the third Southeastern Conference baseball player to win the award since it was first presented in 2000.
The NCAA-record postseason baseball attendance at Dudy Noble Field was rated by Rivals.com as the 2007 top story of the NCAA Super Regionals in a season-ending review by the Internet-based publication. Despite drawing 11 a.m. Friday and Saturday start times, the Mississippi State-Clemson games drew 26,335 at Dudy Noble Field. The series-opener, the first NCAA Super Regional game on the MSU campus, drew an NCAA Super Regional-record 12,620 fans. A day later, MSU fans re-set the Super Regional attendance record when 13,715 fans packed the Bulldogs' home facility as MSU completed a two-game series sweep to advance to its eighth appearance in the prestigious NCAA College World Series. Mississippi State won its first national title in any sport when it took the Collegiate Disc Golf Championship in spring 2009. The "Short Arm Dawgs" shot a six-under-par 62 to win the team national championship by seven strokes over Arkansas. Bulldogs junior Drew Davis won the individual title.
Head softball coach Jay Miller was selected to the prestigious position of head coach of the USA Softball Women's National Team. A long-time veteran of the U.S. coaching ranks, Miller will now lead the four-time Olympic medal-winning team as it enters the 2009 season.
MSU placed six male and female student-athletes on the 2007-08 Southeastern Conference Winter Academic Honor Roll. The university trailed only Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Kentucky on the list.
