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All Ron Polk did in Mississippi was make college baseball matter

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All Ron Polk did in Mississippi was make college baseball matter

Last October, Ron Polk got his first look at the bronze statue that will be dedicated Friday at Dudy Noble Field. (Mississippi State athletics)

This was back in December of 1975. Ron Polk, who was 31, had just been hired from Georgia Southern as the baseball coach at Mississippi State for a salary of $15,000 a year.

A month before, Clarion Ledger published news of Polk’s hiring in a three paragraph story on page 4 of the sports section. A story previewing a Millsaps football game ran on the sports front, along with a story about football coach Bob Tyler’s contract extension and a story about a Delta State women’s basketball exhibition game. College baseball just wasn’t front page news.

Rick Cleveland

Back then, I was the sports editor of the Hattiesburg American and Polk had come to the Hub City to speak to a State alumni group. The late John Buckley, perhaps the most avid Bulldog fan ever, invited my dad and me over to his home to meet Polk.

Three things I remember most about first meeting Polk nearly 48 years ago: 1) he wore two-tone loafers, brown and white; 2) he had a cowlick in his close-cropped hair toward the back of his head; and 3) he was as confident-bordering-on-cocky as any man I had ever met.

Polk told us he was about to change college baseball in Mississippi forever. He said he was going to sell season tickets by the thousands, and it wouldn’t be long before Dudy Noble Field was expanded. He said was going to hold clinics to educate Mississippi’s high school baseball coaches, who at the time were mostly assistant football coaches. Mississippi baseball, he said, was about to get a lot better. He spoke about all that as if it were a matter of fact. At the time, it sounded like so much heresy.

Later, after we had left, I asked Dad what he thought. “Cockiest little banty rooster I’ve ever met,” Dad said.

I agreed. We both laughed and then agreed that if Polk were able to do all that, Mississippi State would need to build a statue in his honor. We laughed even harder.

Now, nearly half a century later, that bronze statue will be dedicated Friday afternoon prior to the first game of the Ole Miss-State weekend series at the entrance down the right field line at what is now Polk-Dement Stadium. All Polk said he would do, he did a long time ago. He has done a lot more.


This column will not be so much about Polk’s 1,373 career victories, the six different Hall of Fame inductions, the eight different teams he took to the College World Series, the 10 different SEC Championships and how he really did change college baseball in Mississippi forever.

Ron Polk

No, this hopefully will tell you more about man. We’ll begin with perhaps my favorite Polk anecdote. This was the spring of 1998, the year after Polk had retired (for the first time) as State’s baseball coach. Pat McMahon’s Bulldogs were hosting an NCAA Regional and Polk was watching from the press box. Polk reached into his briefcase, took out a fat, 8-inch Honduran cigar and fired it up. Just over his head was a “No Smoking” sign, which I pointed out and told him, “I know you’re old and retired but I didn’t know you had forgotten how to read.”

Ron smiled, took a huge draw and exhaled a huge plume of smoke. He pointed to the centerfield wall where his name was prominent.

Said Polk, “Seems to me, you are the one who can’t read.”


From the same year, same regional, same press box: Polk joined broadcaster Jim Ellis to do an inning or two of commentary. I dropped into the booth listen. State’s fine shortstop Brad Freeman, now an NFL official, was at the plate when Polk said, “You know, Jim, Brad is so conscious of reaching that outside slider, he’s really crowding the plate. If he gets a fastball inside, it’s gonna hit him.”

Sure enough, the next pitch was a heater, in, and plunked Freeman flush on his left shoulder. Polk never missed a beat. “You know, Jim,” he said, “this radio commentating is pretty easy stuff.”


Polk retired, briefly, as State’s baseball coach in 1995. He planned to take the job as director of the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) and turned his resignation into the athletic director Larry Templeton, who subsequently offered the job to Pat McMahon. A couple days later, Polk had a change of heart and told Templeton he wanted to stay.

Templeton told Polk he already offered the job to former Polk assistant McMahon, then the head coach at Old Dominion. Templeton told Polk he’d see what he could do. So Templeton asked McMahon if he would consider assisting Polk as associate head coach for two years. McMahon, because of his immense respect for Polk, agreed to do just that.

Two years and another MSU trip to the College World Series later, McMahon took over.

Said Templeton, “I told Ron I needed him to help me raise the money to add skyboxes to Dudy Noble and he agreed.”


Polk spent the 1998 and ’99 seasons out of a dugout for the first time in more than three decades, helping Templeton as a special assistant. Says Templeton, “I have never seen anyone as miserable as Ron was away from the game.”

Larry Tempelton

And then Templeton’s phone rang and the guy on the other end of the phone line was Georgia athletic director Vince Dooley. “I need a baseball coach,” Dooley said. “Got any suggestions?”

Templeton said he might know just the guy. He walked down the hallway and into Polk’s office and told him about the Georgia situation. Long story short: Polk went to Athens, interviewed with Dooley and was offered the job. Polk took it.

Polk came back to Starkville and told Templeton he was the new Georgia baseball coach. Templeton congratulated him and asked him what Georgia was paying him. Polk told him and Templeton said, “That’s not right.”

“So I called Vince and I told him that we paid Mississippi State assistant coaches better than what he was going to pay Polk to be the head coach,” Templeton said. “Vince explained that he had asked Ron what he wanted and that Ron told him, ‘Just pay me what the previous guy was making.’”

Templeton said Dooley asked him what he thought would be a fair salary, and Templeton told him.

“That’s all it took,” Templeton said. “Ron got a $75,000 raise before he ever coached a practice.”


Polk, as always, earned his keep. Georgia was 25-30 the year before he got there. His first Georgia team won 32 games. The second won 47, the SEC championship and went to the 2001 College World Series.

Polk was still in Omaha with Georgia when the news broke that McMahon was leaving Mississippi State to take the Florida baseball job. This time, it was Templeton who called Dooley.

He told Dooley: “Vince, now I’m the one who needs a baseball coach, and I am calling you because it’s time for Ron Polk to come home.”

That’s exactly what happened. Polk came back to State and coached seven more seasons and went on to five NCAA Tournaments and one College World Series. 

Says Templeton, “The whole time I was the athletic director I never had to worry about who was going to lock the doors of the athletic department at the end of the work day. Ron was always the last one to leave, often after midnight, and he always locked the door behind him.”


Again, when Polk was first hired at State (by Charley Shira at a State-LSU football game), the news ran on page four of the sports section of the state’s largest newspaper. There was no press conference. There was no need for one. It simply wasn’t big news. Contrast that with when Polk finally retired for good. The news was the lead story on the front page of the Clarion Ledger and there were several more stories in the sports section. The press conference was packed with reporters and TV cameras.

That might be the best measure Polk changed college baseball in this state. He made it matter. That’s all he did. He made it matter.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend. 

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session. 

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.” 

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass. 

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget. 

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said. 

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session. 

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget. 

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later. 

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said. 

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 14:48:00

Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.

Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu. 

The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1. 

But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.

The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said. 

“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers. 

The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts. 

Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.

The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease. 

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney addresses lawmakers during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. The discussion centered on potential federal healthcare funding cuts.

The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.

Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit. 

Mental health cuts

The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 

Phaedre Cole, president of the Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, speaks to lawmakers about federal healthcare funding cuts during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services. 

The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1. 

Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December. 

“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5. 

Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs. 

The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.

The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.

Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming. 

“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.  

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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