Mark Kingston summed up South Carolina’s offensive issues about as succinctly as possible Sunday afternoon.

“We just strike out too much,” he said.

The Gamecocks were minutes removed from their season-ending loss to Virginia where they scored two runs on seven hits, a frustrating weekend offensively serving microcosm of a largely frustrating offensive season leading to an earlier exit than South Carolina wanted from the NCAA Tournament.

“We still have some work to do offensively. I think that’s clear. I think that doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out,” Kingston said. “We still need to make more progress in that area. That comes with experience; that comes with a lot of factors. It will continue to improve. Again, the total picture is it was a good year but we want great years around here.”

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Entering the postseason the Gamecocks sat near the bottom in most offensive categories and didn’t put together a great offensive tournament, slashing .176/.269/.275 in three games and scored three runs on 11 hits the final 20 innings of the season.

“We saw good pitchers, especially towards the end of the season. I mean we saw them all season. Then, even in this regional there were some really good arms,” Brennan Milone said. “We practiced all season, made the adjustments. Sometimes it’s just tough. Hitting is a hard thing to do. I can’t point to any one thing. We worked hard and it’s just how it ended up.”

The Gamecocks now enter the offseason knowing the offense needs to improve, and it will likely be priority number one over the summer and throughout fall scrimmages.

What needs to improve—like Mark Kingston pointed out—is the strikeout numbers, with the Gamecocks being punched out 545 times, striking out in almost 29 percent of the team’s at-bats.

When they made contact, the results tended to be middling as well. South Carolina’s batting average on balls in play (BABIP), which measures how often a non-home run ball in play goes for a hit, was .298 this season, dead last in the SEC.

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“Guys need to find ways to put the ball in play more. That’s the bottom line,” Kingston said. “We hit for enough power, but you have to be able to put the ball in play at a much more consistent level than we did this year. That’s something that has to get better.”

The Gamecocks’ offense, which was the biggest question mark leading into the season, never really got off the ground for large parts of the season and sputtered at times, especially when SEC play began.

South Carolina could return a few pieces from this year’s team—Braylen Wimmer, Brennan Milone and others—while incorporating a top 15 class with top 200 position player prospects like Cooper Kinney, Michael Braswell, Thad Ector and Carson Hornung.

What is known, though, is the offense is in need of a facelift.

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“A lot of it is, I think, sticking to the approach. It’s hard. I know with myself, coming from my experience, it’s hard in a 56 or 60 game season to consistently do the same thing every day,” Andrew Eyster said.

“It’s difficult. It’s such a mental game. It’s easy when you’re having success, but to repeat that every game and every at-bat is difficult. I think that’s what we struggled with this season.”