Longtime former LSU baseball coach [autotag]Paul Mainieri[/autotag], who retired in 2021, has ended his sabbatical from the sport.
Mainieri recently accepted the head coaching job at South Carolina, making his return to the SEC. Baseball in this conference is a high-stress affair, but Mainieri is used to pressure having spent so much time at an LSU program that is quite accustomed to success.
During a recent appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show, Mainieri said he didn’t worry about the pressure during his tenure with the Tigers — in which he reached Omaha five times, winning a national championship in 2009 and reaching the College World Series final in 2017.
“I told you, Paul, way back then, and I told this to everybody,” Mainieri said, per On3. “When I went to LSU, I didn’t worry about pressure because the pressure was a fear of failure, and I just felt that we were going to succeed I was going to surround myself with great staff, and we were going to go out and recruit really good players — If we coached those players the right way, motivated, and inspired them, the winning would take care of itself. And for the most part it did during my tenure at LSU.
“I’m pretty proud of the things that we accomplished. Certainly, I would have liked to have won another national championship or two, but those things are kind of hard to win… they’re not that easy at the very end. I thought that we had really good teams that competed for it every year. We went to Omaha five times while I was at LSU… I just never really thought about the pressure.”
Mainieri now joins another program where he’ll be living up to the standards set by a legend as Ray Tanner, who coached the Gamecocks from 1997-12 and won back-to-back national titles in 2010 and 2011.
Contact/Follow us @LSUTigersWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Louisiana State news, notes, and opinions.
Follow Tyler to continue the conversation on Twitter: @TylerNettuno