‘In a good place’: Darty Dennis is excited for 2025 volleyball season

STARKVILLE – There’s a lot to look forward to this season for Mississippi State’s volleyball program. 

Looking to improve from last year’s 11-14 finish, MSU brought in four freshmen as a part of its 2025 recruiting class and reached into the transfer portal for a haul of five new Bulldogs to pair with its seven returning players. This season, State is playing in a new volleyball challenge with the ACC, and the SEC Tournament is also making a return.

Head coach Julie Darty Dennis, who is entering her seventh year of leading MSU, spoke about the upcoming season at a Starkville Rotary Club meeting on Aug. 11. She said there’s a lot to be excited about, and it all starts with having a good roster to take them through the upcoming campaign.

Among the new transfers the Bulldogs welcomed in are Bernardita Aguilar, an outside hitter from Buenos Aires, Argentina; Brooke Doherty, a senior outside hitter from South Carolina; Laura Williams, a senior outside hitter from CSU Fullerton; McKenna Dressel, a senior middle blocker from the University of Nevada, Reno; and Gha’Naye Whitfield-Moss, a junior middle blocker from Delaware. 

The freshman class is made up of Lindsey Mangelson, a 6-foot-2 outside hitter from Fishers, Indiana; Avery Power, a defensive specialist from Brandon; Bre Perrin, a setter from Pell City, Alabama; and Hailey Campagna, an outside hitter from Dublin, Ohio.

There are a few new players who Dennis is excited about. One of them is Aguilar, one of the program’s few international prospects.

“She’s got a live arm,” Dennis said. “She’s the right size; she’s a lefty, so we think she’ll bring us some energy right away and hopefully will score a ton of points for us.” 

The other players are Mangelson and Power. Mangelson is a prospect Dennis described as a “diamond in the rough.”

“A lot of people saw potential in her but didn’t think she was going to make the jump,” Darty Dennis said. “She made the jump, so we’re very excited and are going to do everything we can to keep her here for four years. She’s 6-foot-2 and is long and is physical. She’s having a great time getting to know the older girls.”

Power was a record-setting performer at Brandon, establishing a new mark for digs in a career with 2,057. 

“She’s a little (defensive specialist) and she’s spicy and she’s super energetic,” she said. “To me, there’s just something in the Jackson area – they just play really hard. They are just really good competitors.”  

It’s a roster that Darty Dennis thinks can do some damage in the highly competitive SEC, which has five teams ranked in the NCAA’s preseason top 25 list. Texas and Kentucky are the only two SEC teams to capture a national championship in the sport; the Longhorns won back-to-back titles from 2022-23 and the Wildcats claimed the crown in the 2020 season. State is looking to snap a skid of back-to-back losing seasons.

“The team is in good shape,” Darty Dennis said. “I think that we are in a good place. I think the rest of the conference is in a good place. I mean, the Big 10 and (SEC) are two of the best conferences in the country to play volleyball. Top to bottom, there’s not one team that we look at and we think this is going to be easy. Every single match day-in and day-out is going to be hard. We also have a pretty good nonconference schedule to get us prepared for that.” 

The new crew of Bulldogs can be seen in action at 1 p.m Saturday at the Newell-Grissom Building in an exhibition game against Memphis. MSU then has three straight home contests against SEMO, Grambling State and North Alabama before it plays in the Blue Raider Bash in Murfreesboro, Tenn., beginning on Sept. 5. On Sept. 10, State welcomes Duke to Starkville for a match as a part of the Showdown at the Net. It’s a two-year challenge that pairs teams from the SEC and the ACC together for a match, and State will have a different opponent next year.

“Duke is coming to us, which I’m really excited about,” she said. “I think it’s an awesome thing for us to get high quality opponents in our gym.” 

SEC play gets underway on Sept. 26 at Florida – just like the 2021 season in which the Bulldogs finished the year 25-6 overall and 16-2 in conference play.  

“I’m not superstitious or anything, but I’m excited about that,” she said. 

Had there been an SEC volleyball tournament that year, MSU would have been the No. 2 seed, just behind eventual national champion Kentucky. Fortunately, the Bulldogs will no longer have to wonder what might’ve been, as the SEC Tournament is back this season for the first time since 2005 – something Darty Dennis said is “very, very cool.” Along with excitement, the tournament will provide playoff opportunities to the program that hasn’t been to the postseason since that special 2021 season.

“I think for us, who are a team that doesn’t go to the postseason every single year, we need postseason experience to kind of feel what that ‘survive and advance’ (scenario) feels like. (The tournament) will help us kind of understand what it’s like to play in the postseason.”  

Darty Dennis said there is buzz in the building on campus and that her team can’t wait to get started.

“So, great schedule ahead, great team ahead, great support staff, great coaching staff. It’s hard to believe fall sports are already back,” she said with a smile.

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