For 29 years, Michigan State Softball had the same coach as the face of the team: Jacquie Joseph. She inherited the team before any of today’s players were born and announced her retirement in May, one month after she reached her 750th MSU victory.
Sharonda McDonald-Kelley didn’t consider herself a candidate for the position that was vacant for the first time in nearly three decades. Joseph is a college softball coach that McDonald-Kelley idolized. Plus, McDonald-Kelley was the head coach at Campbell University in North Carolina, where she was having great success, had met her husband and had their first child. If she were to take a leap in her career, it would've ideally be in the South where it’s warm and close to home.
Michigan State reached out to McDonald-Kelley. She politely declined. Then Joseph gave her a call and everything changed.
Joseph, with an overall record of more than 800 victories during her tenure, endorsed her, telling McDonald-Kelley that she was the right person to supplant her.
“I was like, 'Woah, this is Jacquie Joseph,’” McDonald-Kelley said. “When someone's in a position like that for 29 years, you give your life to it. And so when you're passing something along and I'm a person that she thinks can be a great fit, then it's like, 'OK.' It was an honor, I guess, to get that call from her. I thought that was pretty cool.”
McDonald-Kelley is the sixth head coach in program history, bringing with her a winning pedigree from her playing days at Texas A&M, to playing seven years of professional softball and numerous coaching stops along the way. She's been handed the keys to MSU's program, one that she plans to revitalize through her competitive mindset.
“To me, I'm so competitive,” McDonald-Kelley said. “If you don't win at the end of the year, then it's the worst.”
Finding her game and a passion away from softball
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, McDonald-Kelley wasn’t surrounded by softball like many other professionals. Her parents didn’t play, nor did her two sisters. It wasn’t until McDonald-Kelley was seven years old that she brought a softball flyer home from school, telling her parents that she wanted to play.
“I didn't have parents that played or anything like that,” McDonald-Kelley said. “I have an older sister, so the next year she also played and a younger sister that when she got (to an) age where could play, she played too – so we're now a softball family situation.”
McDonald-Kelley played at Texas A&M where she was a four-time All-Big 12 selection from 2004 to 2007. She was a speedster on the bases, holding the Texas A&M record for career stolen bases (153) – at one time stealing 73 consecutive bases, tying an NCAA record. In 2005, she led the NCAA with 48 steals, earning her the Golden Shoe Award. McDonald-Kelley was also a force with the bat, compiling a .338 career batting average and ranking second in Aggie history with 249 all-time hits and 195 runs.
In her final season with Texas A&M, she led the team to its first Women’s College World Series in 20 years, before returning as a coach later. During her seven years of professional softball in the United States and Italy, McDonald-Kelley also decided to give coaching a shot, despite some weariness of whether or not it was the right fit for her.
“I did not want to coach,” McDonald-Kelley said. “(When) I was in college, I would work our camps at Texas A&M and I think it was my junior year into my senior year, that summer, I was doing a camp and one of the other coaches there was like, 'You're good at this, would you want to do this?', I was like, 'No, never. I would never want to coach.’”
McDonald-Kelley started her coaching career in 2009 at Texas Southern, then was an assistant coach at Ohio from 2010 to 2012. She made other stops at LSU, Texas Tech, Florida and Ohio State before settling down as Campbell’s head coach in 2019.
Campbell went 26-28 in McDonald-Kelley’s first season, then 10-15 in 2020 before the season was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when the program took a huge jump, going 28-19 in 2021, winning the Big South and advancing to the NCAA Regionals. She then followed it up with a 37-19 record and another appearance in the NCAA Regionals.
While bouncing around from school to school isn’t easy on anyone, it hasn’t been all that bad for McDonald-Kelley. It has also fed one of her passionate hobbies outside of softball: home renovations.
She’s working on her sixth house now, recently finishing with tiling her shower. Next, she’s working on the freestanding bathtub, where she surrounded it with shiplap and painted it. McDonald-Kelley said she still needs to install the bathtub and finish up the painting, and then she will move on to the next bathroom when that one’s complete.
“My brain loves to problem solve, so I like the idea of figuring out how to fix things and put them back together,” McDonald-Kelley said. “The demo was a lot of fun, but, yeah, I like just putting things together and building things.”
McDonald-Kelley has also realized the stress relief that can come with it.
“When I get mad about a game, I come home and rip down some cabinets,” McDonald-Kelley quipped. “Then you have to put them back which is the hard part, but it's kind of like a nice stress relief and another world I can kind of go to.”
"It's not a lack of talent"
Restoring Michigan State as a force to be reckoned with is no easy task. The Spartans have been in the Big Ten gutter for most of the last 20 years, recording just one winning season since 2007. MSU last qualified for the NCAA Regionals in 2004, part of a Cinderella Big Ten Tournament run where the seventh-seeded Spartans won the entire tournament. The last three seasons have hit rock bottom, with Michigan State not finishing higher than 12th in the conference.
One of McDonald-Kelley’s first tasks on her to-do list was to shake up the culture. It started with her determining a theme for the first season: "Unleash." Forgetting what’s happened in the past and analyzing with a different approach is – in her eyes – paramount from the start.
“I think everyone understands what it can be and everyone understands we're underperforming and everyone understands the word 'potential,'” McDonald-Kelley said. “We talk about it a lot, but it's just a word until you make something of it.”
McDonald-Kelley brought Danielle Stenger with her from Campbell to help install that culture. Stenger was named Michigan State’s pitching coach, after she aided Campbell to a 2.10 team ERA in 2022. She also hired Nadia Taylor as the new hitting coach, a nine-year professional player who was a four-time all-conference player at Texas from 2009 to 2012.
“I think what stands out the most to me is that they hold us to a different standard,” senior third baseman Jessica Mabrey said. “They expect a lot from us. We expect a lot from them, and they push us to get the best out of us. It's not always easy, but it's definitely worth it. They're trying to get us to the next level as we want to be to the next level, so it's really encouraging that they believe in us enough to care enough to push us.”
The transfer portal age of college athletics has helped expedite rebuilding programs, and McDonald-Kelley did not shy away from utilizing it. In fact, 12 of the 23 players on the team are new, including seven freshmen and five transfers.
“We have some really good talent,” McDonald-Kelley said. “It's not a lack of talent, and I tell them that every day. It's just a matter of changing your mindset into championship thinkers.”
Michigan State will start its first month of the season as always down south, with the season-opener on Feb. 10 against Texas A&M - Commerce. The Spartans will return home March 21 for a mid-week game versus Central Michigan, before kickstarting conference play that weekend against Wisconsin.
“I think we have an advantage over other teams just because we have girls coming in from everywhere, all schools, like different age levels,” senior first baseman Camryn Wincher said. “We mesh so well. We all are very just realistic in our own way and we're all unique.”
And while Joseph is still working with the athletic department as a sport administrator for men’s and women’s tennis, gymnastics and rowing, she has also kept her door open for McDonald-Kelley to drop by. But one thing remains clear, the MSU softball reins now belong to McDonald-Kelley.
“She's awesome,” McDonald-Kelley said of her relationship with Joseph. “I think her kind of objective and thoughts were she was going to stay out of it and if I needed her she'd be there. That's exactly what she's done. She's been so awesome. And I think the foundation she's left for us and our staff is a really good one. I'm thankful for her and thankful for the groundwork that she's put in here.”
