Jesse Franklin’s incredible freshman turnaround

For the most part, John Morning-
star knew what was about to happen. 
The softball coach was sitting in a suite 
at a Toledo Mud Hens minor league 
baseball game with some friends 
and co-workers watching the Detroit 
Tigers on a TV at the back of the suite.
Detroit was batting with less than 
two outs and a runner on first, so he 
figured that the Tigers would try and 
advance the man on base somehow. 
The niece of one of his coaching part-
ners, a bright-eyed tween softball 
pitcher, suggested that it was a bunting 
situation.
Plop. Indeed, it was a bunt. The 
Tigers advanced a runner. As the game 
progressed, the two continued to dis-
cuss the intricacies of baseball, and 
Morningstar became more and more 
astounded at the child’s innate knowl-
edge of the game.
“I’m sitting here, talking to a 12-year 
old girl about advanced strategy in a 
baseball game like I would talk to an 
adult that played the game all of their 
life,” Morningstar thought to himself. 
“Wow.”
That girl wasn’t the only truly pro-
phetic one sitting in the box at Fifth 
Third Field. It would be years before 
the girl standing next to him would 
lead the nation in victories as a col-
lege freshman, compile a 32-3 record 
with 0.90 earned run average and be 
a successful engineering student, but 
Morningstar knew that very day: he 
was in the presence of a star.Her name 
was Meghan Beaubien.
****
The moment Beaubien stepped 
onto the sprawling green lawns of 
Saint Mary’s Catholic Central High 
School in Monroe, Mich., she already 
had a plan. She was determined to take 
the hardest possible classes and be the 
valedictorian. Hardly surprising for 
someone who scored a 29 on her ACT 
— as an eighth grader.
As if that weren’t enough, she was 
determined to play softball at Michi-
gan. Beaubien went to Michigan soft-
ball games many times during her 
childhood, and she sat in awe of the 
atmosphere there each time she went.
The summer before her freshman 
year of high school, Beaubien was 
already neck deep in the recruiting 
process. Even though she had been 
pitching since she was seven years 
old and paired that experience with a 
longstanding, acute knowledge of the 
game, the possibility of high-level soft-
ball as a future for Beaubien became 
closer and closer to becoming a reality.

Even though Beaubien had been to 
different college softball camps like 
Michigan State’s, Tennessee’s softball 
camp was a watershed moment for 
the left hander. No conference in all 
of college softball was as strong as the 
Southeastern Conference was.
She rose to the moment and clocked 
in at 65 miles per hour fastball on the 
radar gun. Tennessee co-head coaches 
and NFCA Hall of Famers Karen and 
Ralph Weekly were impressed and 
congratulated Beaubien.
“Wow this is a big SEC school,” 
Beaubien thought. “And if that coach is 
impressed by what I did, I can impress 
other coaches as well.”
Beaubien thanked the two coaches, 
but the Weeklys knew they wouldn’t 
have much of a chance with the Michi-
gan native.
“Look,” Ralph Weekly said, accord-
ing to Beaubien. “Call us if [Michigan 
coach Carol Hutchins] passes on you, 
but we don’t think she will.”
From that point on, Beaubien — 
who ended up being ranked as the No. 
6 recruit in the Country by FloSoftball.
com in 2017 — was a hot commodity. 
Though she didn’t hear back from the 
Volunteers, she racked up offers from 
Ohio State, Northwestern, Michigan 
State and two SEC schools. But Michi-
gan remained her preference.
The prospect of being a Wolverine 
seemed almost too good to be true. 
Beaubien lived less than an hour away 
from Ann Arbor, had attended games 
at Michigan’s Alumni Field in the past 
and was well on her way to becom-
ing a strong enough student to attend 
the school, with or without athletics. 
Hutchins and assistant coach Jennifer 
Brundage attended a few of Beaubien’s 
games at St. Mary Catholic Central her 
freshman year and remained in close 
contact with the left-hander knowing 
her interest in playing for Michigan.
The coach invited Beaubien — 
like she did with many recruits — to 
watch Michigan football play Ohio 
State. While at first Beaubien assumed 
that this was just another step in the 
recruiting machine for Michigan, 
Hutchins’ words over the phone stuck 
out:
“When you’re there, I want to talk 
about your future,” Hutchins said. “At 
Michigan.”
Beaubien’s heart jumped out of 
her chest. She basically had one part 
of her three-part plan in the bag. Yet, 
when Hutchins pulled her into the 
tunnel at Michigan Stadium during 
halftime of the game and extended her 
an offer, Beaubien didn’t accept the it 
right away. Like any smart player, she 
needed time to think about and comb 

through her options.
No matter where Beaubien visited 
after that, though, it always came back 
to Michigan.
Was this school as academically 
renowned as Michigan?
Even if it was, how good is the soft-
ball program compared to Michigan’s?
Was this school the right fit?
Sure, it might’ve been easy to accept 
the offer from her dream school imme-
diately, but Beaubien took time to look 
at every opportunity in front of her. 
About a month after the original offer, 
all it took was one hour of meetings 
with Hutchins and the coaching staff 
to discuss academics and finances to 
make Beaubien a Wolverine.
But that was just one goal to check 
off her list. With three years of high 
school left, Beaubien had more accom-
plishments in mind. As a sophomore, 
Beaubien led SMCC to its first of three 
consecutive Michigan state champi-
onships. She never allowed a run in 
any of her championship appearances 
— and even threw a perfect game as a 
junior. All three years, she was named 
Michigan Gatorade Player of the Year.
As much as she was on top of the 
softball world, though, Beaubien 
still had yet to quench her academic 
desires. She originally wanted to take 
an Honors Anatomy and Physiol-
ogy class, but didn’t have room in her 
normal schedule to take it with all the 
other Honors and Advanced Place-
ment classes already on deck. Rather 
than just dropping the class, Beaubien 
opted to take it as an independent 
study.
“She is a student that does not just 
settle for the average or norm,” said 
Beaubien’s Honors Anatomy and 
Physiology teacher Scott Hoffmann. 
“She wants to know all the details and 
inter-workings that go with finding a 
solution or answer to a problem. She 
took pride in going above and beyond 
and when she had setbacks, which 
were few, she took it as a personal chal-
lenge to do better.”
After seeing Beaubien thrive in 
the class and find success in calculus, 
chemistry and biology, Hoffmann 
pulled Beaubien aside one day and 
implored her to explore biomedical 
engineering. The combination of math 
and human anatomy piqued her inter-
est, and Michigan happened to have a 
top-ranked program in that depart-
ment.
It’s not hard to see where some 
of those smarts and determination 
comes from. Beaubien’s dad, Jason, 
was a softball coach in his own right, 
while her mom, Kim, was a former 
soccer player at Boston College. Jason, 

in fact, coached Beaubien for much of 
her early softball career and spent time 
coaching with Morningstar as well.
The father-daughter duo worked 
together through Beaubien’s fresh-
man year at St. Mary Catholic Central. 
At that point, however, Jason realized 
that maybe, Beaubien didn’t need him 
anymore as a coach — he was coaching 
to spend time with her rather than to 
actually guide her softball journey.
“From that point on, I had to be a 
supportive parent,” Jason said. “At the 
time it was hard, but looking back on it 
it was a great decision…I still was close 
to her, but I was never on the staff any-
more. But obviously, it worked out.”
That didn’t mean that Jason or Kim 
were not part of Beaubien’s athletic 
life by any means — in fact, quite the 
opposite. Every Sunday, the Beaubien 
family would drive Meghan back and 
forth from their home in Newport to 
Chicago so she could practice with her 
travel team, the Beverly Bandits. Jason 
estimated that going to Chicago cost 
the family about 10 hours in travel time 
per weekend — and that doesn’t even 
include cross-country trips to tourna-
ments.
To whom much is given, though, 
much is expected. In those car rides 
across the Michigan countryside, 
Beaubien never put her feet up on the 
seat and played on her phone. She did 
two things and two things only in the 
back seat of her dad’s car: sleep, or man-
age the mountains of science and math 
coursework she was assigned. On 
some school nights, Beaubien would 
stay up all night doing homework, even 
after long practices or games.
Coaches, teammates and others 
who know Beaubien are quick to talk 
about that kind of determination, her 
aforementioned brand of competitive-
ness and unmatched intellect. What 
they’re also eager to talk about, though, 
is the side of Meghan that the average 
fan might not see from far away in the 
stands, or a school acquaintance might 
see passing her by in the hallway.
In one of her first trips with the 
Bandits, Beaubien and a group of 14Us 
traveled to California for a showcase. 
Before the first game, Bandits head 
coach Bill Conroy and the players 
met for breakfast. He noticed that 
most of the players were in uniform, 
or pre-game clothes, per usual. Beau-
bien, however, showed up in the hotel’s 
bathrobe, donning a shower cap on her 
head like it was a crown. While some 
of her teammates laughed at her outfit, 
the pitcher sat down, ate her breakfast 
and went through the meetings like 
nothing was wrong.
“She was not embarrassed or gun 

shy at all about coming down less than 
her stellar self,” Conroy said. “I thought 
she could laugh at herself, and she has a 
unique personality that I thought was 
a good mix of being really competitive, 
really smart but also being able to have 
fun.”
It didn’t take long for Beaubien 
to prove Conroy right in all three of 
those phases. Beaubien pitched well 
for the Bandits, who despite playing 
up multiple levels to 18Us, beat the 18U 
defending national champions from 
Southern California in the last game of 
the showcase.
At the end of games, Conroy usually 
talks to each one of his players and tells 
each one what she did well during the 
game and where she might improve. 
For players like Beaubien, that usually 
amounted to a good amount of praise, 
with a few adjustments for the future.
As he went down the lineup after 
the victory, Conroy got to one of the 
Bandits’ first basemen and paused. 
He had nothing good to say about her 
— she got multiple people thrown out 
because she didn’t protect them and 
missed a bunch of signs. Before Conroy 
could say anything, though, he heard a 
familiar voice.
“Xio!” Beaubien exclaimed. “You’re 
so beautiful!”
The whole locker room erupted 
in laughter. Conroy chose not to offer 
any criticism of the player because 
Beaubien’s humor served that purpose 
without hurting her feelings. On the 
surface, Beaubien’s comment might 
just seem like a joke, but her quick 
thinking showed Conroy that Beau-
bien was ready more to go far — in the 
softball world and as a student.
“When you have academics and 
athletic ability and you understand 
how to be a good teammate from not 
just a physical standpoint but a mental 
and emotional aspect as well, those 
are the three aspects that I look at as a 
coach to determine what kind of ath-
lete you’re dealing with,” Conroy said.
Indeed Beaubien had, and still 
has, all those traits. Looking back 
at all those years of hard work from 
Conroy’s criteria, Beaubien reached 
perfection. Not only was she able to 
maintain a fine balance between her 
pitching life and taking the hardest 
classes at her school, but Beaubien did 
in fact successfully check off her goal 
of becoming valedictorian and pitch at 
Michigan.
Maybe it was destiny. Maybe Beau-
bien knew from day one that she would 
reach those goals. Maybe her family 
and coaches did too. One thing is for 
certain — Beaubien, just like she did in 
that Mud Hens suite, called her shot.

RIAN RATNAVALE
Daily Sports Writer

11

Thursday, May 17, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com SPORTS