Entering the season, Mark Kingston and Skylar Meade didn’t shy away from it.

The Gamecocks were preparing to begin the 2021 season with a pitching staff full of highly-rated prospects scattered across three different recruiting classes, and the coaching staff wasn’t coy saying this staff had a chance to do something impactful this year.

So far, so good as South Carolina enters the postseason ready to lean on what has turned into one of the best pitching staffs in the SEC.

“Do they give us a chance to win every game?” said Meade, South Carolina’s pitch coach. “I look at it like this: if you were always in striking distance you have a chance to win…I think we’ve given ourselves a chance to win every game. You can’t win every game—we all know that—but you give yourself an opportunity to win as many games as possible.”

South Carolina’s pitching has been a stalwart for the Gamecocks this season—top four in the league in ERA (3.85), opponent batting average (.225), strikeouts (599) and runs allowed (237)—but to see how good the staff is this year is to understand how South Carolina got here.

After losing the bulk of pitchers after the 2018 season—this staff’s first season in Columbia—Meade knew it was going to be tough from a depth perspective and needed players to stay healthy.

Three weeks into the season Carmen Mlodzinski went down for the year with a broken foot and things began to snowball; the Gamecocks didn’t have a settled rotation and struggled to the league’s worst ERA at 5.51 in a 28-28 season.

“The part about recruiting that’s different than pro ball, we couldn’t go out and sign a free agent and bring guys in immediately,” Meade said. “We were like, ‘Man, we know what we have to do to address this but they’re not getting to campus until August of 2019.’”

Then things began to change through recruiting and a little bit of luck.

The Gamecocks signed—and got to campus—some of the best junior college pitchers in country in the 2019 class with Brannon Jordan, Thomas Farr and Andrew Peters to pair with arms from the 2019 team like Daniel Lloyd and Brett Kerry, Julian Bosnic and Wes Sweatt.

But, despite some really good numbers through 16 games, COVID shut things down, ending things prematurely but giving South Carolina one more stroke of luck.

With the pandemic raging, the MLB Draft shrunk to five rounds, meaning not only a return for almost every pitcher from South Carolina’s 2020 team but the high profile pitchers from a top 10 recruiting class like Will Sanders, Jack Mahoney, Jackson Phipps and others.

“The biggest thing we had to do was really grind and communicate and give information to the guys and their families on why college was the best route,” Meade said.

“Obviously we believe in what we’re doing here with our pitchers and the development track record speaks for itself but we had to make sure those relationships were on point and make sure guys were aware when they get here they’re going to be taken care of.”

When all was said and done, two years after the hardship of 2019’s season, South Carolina’s pitching staff was transformed and looked wholly different.

They got bigger—averaging an inch taller and nine pounds heavier this year compared to 2019—and with it came velocity; South Carolina seemingly has a conveyor belt of arms throwing 95 miles per hour as a starter or out of the bullpen with good breaking balls.

“We hit on some freshmen who are very talented and guys who I don’t think have reached their potential, even though it’s trending that way,” Meade said. “It was a concerted effort. Obviously recruiting is where it starts and I take place in that, but coach Couch and coach Current deserve tons of credit.”

The perfect storm of Meade and the two recruiting coordinators over the last three years—Mike Current and Trip Couch—building these classes plus some draft luck led to the Gamecock staff living up to expectations as NCAA Tournament play begins.

As a staff South Carolina is one of the top four pitching staffs in the SEC, and by proxy the country, with a 3.85 ERA and a WHIP of 1.27 as it navigated around the third-toughest schedule in the country.

Starting pitchers have a 3.77 ERA and a 1.28 WHIP this season, but the strength has been the bullpen during the regular season with a 3.89 ERA, 1.30 WHIP but only allowing 41 of the 113 inherited runners to score.

“Once they’ve gotten here almost every guy has continued to get better and trend in a way that made themselves a high-profile SEC arm,” Meade said. “I think that’s what’s set the stage for such a good pitching staff in 2021.”

Now comes crunch time for this pitching staff with the NCAA Tournament starting Friday against Virginia (noon, ESPN2).

D1Baseball’s Kendall Rogers noted how good the Gamecocks’ arms have been, tweeting this week South Carolina has “the arms to get to Omaha.” Now it’s time for postseason baseball.

“We’ve done an incredible job but we’ve had times and chances to stuff people at the end of innings and that hasn’t happened. Then that can have a tremendous effect on the course of a game or further. I want to see that,” Meade said.

“Then there’s going to be guys who have opportunities that may or may not feel foreign to them. I want guys to go in with the right mindset and go in there and handle it and be successful.”