When a baton leaves Natalie's hand on a high toss, she goes somewhere. She calls it autopilot. Depending on the trick, her eyes stay on the baton the whole way up, or she drops into an illusion or an aerial and finds it again as she stands. And before it ever starts coming down, she already knows what needs to be done. "If my baton is too far out, or to the right, or to the left, or behind me," she told me, "my body almost automatically positions itself to where it needs to be to catch it."
That is the moment on the crak tiles. A twirler, mid-toss, crossed batons in the air, nothing caught yet. I drew her that way on purpose, and I drew her from a real person on purpose, because The Grove Collection was always going to be made of the things I love most about Ole Miss, and one of the people I love most spent her college Saturdays on that field in the uniform, catching everything she threw. So the twirler on the tile is Natalie, drawn from her and for her. This is her story, one I have been excited to share since the day she said yes, told the way a toss happens: the release, the air, and the catch.
The release
Natalie was three years old the first time a baton was put in her hand, and she did not pick it up alone. Her mom had twirled before her. And her mom's old coach was still running a recreational class in their town when Natalie was just old enough to walk into it, so her mom and her aunt put her and her cousin in it together. It is a small detail, and my favorite one, because it means there was already a row of women behind Natalie, loving her and cheering her on, before there was ever a twirling career to cheer for.
Her first coach was Miss Stacy. But sweet little three-year-old Natalie had a speech impediment and could not say it properly, so Miss Stacy became Miss Daisy. Natalie is grown now and can say it just fine, and she still, to this day, calls her Miss Daisy. I love that. The women who are there at the very beginning get to keep the names we gave them, and somewhere along the way a mispronunciation stops being a mistake and becomes a bond. Some things stick because they mean more than a name.
Originally, she had started in dance, the way a lot of little girls do. But then her mom brought her to the baton, and the rest was history. After her very first competition, she ran back across the floor, found her mom, and asked, "Can I do that again?" Funny enough, I ask myself the same thing after every game of mahjong I play with these tiles!
Can I do that again?
That question was Natalie at three, and by her own account, it was Natalie at every practice after. "Little Natalie at practice was a bundle of joy," she told me, and I believe her, because grown Natalie is the same. She loved the older girls. She loved her teammates. She loved practicing with her mom. In fact, her mom used to joke that she did not have a single competitive bone in her body, because she wanted to be friends with everybody at a competition, especially the girls she was competing against.
You can see that joy in the first big moment she remembers. At just six years old, in the middle of a routine at nationals, she caught her two-turn on the floor for the first time in her life. She could not contain herself. She jumped up and down in front of the judges, mid-routine, and then she went on to win the national title, which tells you everything about the kind of competitor she turned out to be: one who was never trying to beat anyone else, only the last version of herself.
And behind every one of those routines, for every one of those years, there was the same woman. "My mom was always the person in my corner," Natalie said. She designed every costume Natalie has worn since she was little, drove her everywhere, did her makeup every competition morning, and pulled her hair into the tightest bun humanly possible so it would not fall out mid-routine. Behind every strong daughter there is a mother like that, doing the quiet work of helping her chase a dream and, without either of them noticing, shaping the woman she is going to become.
The air
The middle of a toss is the part you cannot see the end of. For Natalie, it was the longest part.
Twirling is a solo sport, and the older she got, the lonelier it became. Her coaches lived in other states, which meant at least one weekend a month belonged entirely to the baton. Either her coach flew in, or she flew out. The rest of the time she practiced by herself. And most gyms where she grew up either would not allow twirlers or did not have ceilings high enough for the tosses, so three times a week she drove an hour there and an hour back to one that did. On the days she couldn't make the drive, she practiced outside in the New York cold, or inside in whatever room she could find.
By the end of middle school she had found a dance team and a set of friends, and the baton started to feel like a thing she did by herself, with her mom, in an empty gym. She started to wonder, the way every high schooler wonders, whether she was good enough to keep going, for Team USA, for a college position, for any of it. So in eighth grade she stepped back, skipped twirling nationals, and went to dance nationals instead.
"And stepping away made me realize how much I love being in my own space, just me and my baton," she told me. "It truly was an escape."
So she made the decision to come back. Everyone who has ever stuck with something hard knows what that's like. And they know the rough patch always comes before you fall back in love with whatever it is you almost walked away from.
By the time college came, Natalie had been traveling alone and living without her family for stretches since she was small, so moving far away did not scare her. And since she was tired of the New York winters, she knew she wanted to come to the South. She applied across the SEC, narrowed it to three schools, toured them over spring break of her senior year of high school, and fell in love with Ole Miss.
Then she had to choose. Another university offered her a twirler line position. Ole Miss did not even hold tryouts her freshman year. She had spent her whole life working toward twirling in college, and the school she wanted to go to could not promise her a place to do it. So she made the difficult choice to turn down the other school anyway, "because," she said, "I knew Ole Miss was going to be the place where I was going to thrive." It was a hard choice, but it was the right one for her. And I think it tells you as much about her as anything on a competition floor ever could.
I knew Ole Miss was going to be the place where I was going to thrive.
When she got to college, she spent her first fall watching the Twirlers from the stands and just knew that it was what she had to do for the rest of her time at the University of Mississippi. There was a twirler two years older named Alexa Tamburlin, who captained the team, and who was so personable and hard-working and selfless that Natalie decided that was what an Ole Miss Twirler was supposed to be, and the example she would try to live up to herself.
The catch
Sophomore year, her dream came true. She put the uniform on for the first time in her college apartment at the Arbors, straps still unpinned, her mom on the phone. "I remember looking at myself in the mirror with the M logo on my hip for the first time," she said, "and I just couldn't help but stare. It all settled in, in that moment, that I had accomplished one of the goals I set for myself at a young age." And it was a little girl with big dreams who looked back at her in the mirror that day, standing in an apartment in Oxford, proud of every ounce of perseverance and dedication it took to get there.
I want you to feel a game day the way she lived it, because it started the day before, and it was built on faith, talent, and a little bit of good luck. Natalie is superstitious in the way only athletes are. She had to have Cafecito's on Friday morning, or it meant the Rebels would lose. She had to wear the same pajamas every Friday night before a game. And by the time Saturday came, the day already had a shape, and she moved through it the same way she moved through a routine: hair first, then makeup, then the practice uniform, then the game day bag, and finally out the door. None of it rushed and every bit of it earned.
The first time the crowd saw her was at the Grove show, where the twirlers perform under the trees and then meet the little girls who came to watch them. When I picture this, all I can think about is little three-year-old Natalie herself, because every one of those girls is standing where she stood, looking up at her the same way she once looked up at the women who came before her.
Finally she made it to the stadium, where her all-time favorite game day moment would take place. In all four years of twirling on Saturdays, she says, the best part was pregame, when the band plays Rock and Roll and the twirlers help form the tunnel the team runs through. "Seeing all of the fans, the stadium completely packed, and feeling all of the energy as we're creating the tunnel," she said, "is something I will never forget." If the years in the empty gym were the toss, that moment was the catch. Every cold weekend, every hour on the highway, every doubt in eighth grade, all of it coming down at once into a packed stadium and landing right in her hands.
If the years in the empty gym were the toss, that moment was the catch.
And on night games, there was one more toss to make, the one nobody forgets. Between the third and fourth quarters, during Code Red, the Twirlers light their batons at both ends and send them up into the dark. So if you have sat in Vaught-Hemingway on a Saturday night and watched a baton go up over the field, burning at both ends, you have most likely watched Natalie, without ever knowing it.
The crak tiles and what came down
Here is what she said when I asked what all those years in rooms full of women older than her did for her: "I never understood how many women supported me and loved me until I was on the other side of my career." Coaches, judges, older twirlers, other moms. All of them pouring into a little girl who wanted to be friends with her competitors. She did not see it while it was happening. She sees it now, from the other side, coaching her home team, the Showtwirlers, and still talking to her coaches and her teammates and the Twirler alumni who came before her. Once you are connected to Ole Miss, it is for life. Once you are connected to the twirling world, apparently, it is the same.
I know that feeling from a different direction.
Mahjong is a game. But the longer I have played it, the more I have come to think that the game is the smallest part of it. When I first started, my friends and I were hanging out, talking, and laughing for hours without a single person glued to a phone. I learned things about my best friends I had never known, all because something on the table made us look at each other instead of a screen. And when I sat down with my mom and my grandmother, I found myself having conversations that went past the surface for the first time in a long time. It took me a while to understand what was happening. There was a gap I had been oblivious to, between the generation that grew up with a phone in its hand and the ones that didn't. It was nobody's fault, and I began to realize the game was closing it one hand at a time. The women older than me had been pouring into me all along. I just needed a table to notice.
Some connections take a table. Some only take a couch. Natalie and I met at our friend Lucy's house, watching Dancing with the Stars. It was my last year of undergrad and her first year of grad school, and we only crossed paths because Lucy had started grad school and met Natalie there. "I didn't even know your name before you came and sat next to me," Natalie told me when I asked about that night, "and we started cracking jokes, and since then we've just always been there."
If it hadn't been for that one last year, and grad school, and the small strings in the universe that pull people together, we would never have met. And that is the thing about the crak tiles, if you'll let me get sentimental about a game piece. If we hadn't met and connected across the room that night, I would never have had the inspiration to make her a design that sits on a table where people play a game and do exactly that all night long: connect.
When I asked Natalie if I could put her on a tile, she said the only word she could think of was yes, and that she was excited to be included in such a big moment of mine. The last question I asked her, when I was writing this story, was whether there was anything she wanted to add that I hadn't thought of. She answered with the kindest words about me, the kind that make your heart smile and your eyes tear up a little. And that is exactly the kind of connection and friendship this tile design is about. Thank you, Natalie, for being such a true friend and such a bright light to everyone you meet. I hope everyone who plays with The Grove Collection Tile Set recognizes you on the crak tiles and feels the same kind of connection from across the table with the women they are playing with, old friends and new ones alike.
On The Grove Collection's crak tiles, the twirler is Natalie: mid-toss, crossed batons in the air, drawn from her and for her. The tiles are built in layers and the art is embossed, so under your thumb the batons stand up off the surface the way they stand against the sky over the field. Nothing on this tile is there by accident, least of all her.
So this one is for Natalie, and for Miss Daisy, and for every mother who ever did a daughter's makeup and designed her costumes year after year. Set the table. Pick up your tiles. Enjoy your friends and family. And make new connections everywhere you go.