Every introductory press conference for a new head coach has that same iconic moment. The new head coach and the Athletics Director embracing for a photo, a public opening to a new era after the private one featuring negotiations and contracts.
But it would be hard to imagine one with more accolades than the handshake and snapshot Thursday in Columbia. Athletics Director Ray Tanner, with his two National Championships and six trips to the College World Series, embraced a man who, at least in terms of total wins, was actually more successful than him. Paul Mainieri has 1,505 career wins, six College World Series himself, a National Championship and one more mission in what he admitted will be the final stop of his storied career.
To match he man who hired him.
“We only won one National Championship,” Mainieri said of his time at LSU. “Ray’s got me there. I need another skin on the wall to catch up with Ray.”
Tanner handed off the keys to a Ferrari of a baseball program that has run more like a beat up Honda Civic for the last decade and change, 12 years and counting since the last time it drove through the gates in Omaha. In truth the last dozen seasons have not been completely disastrous by most standards, something Tanner himself acknowledged Thursday. Nine trips to the NCAA Tournament, four Super Regionals, even one super at home.
But that never was, nor will it continue to be, the standard.
“We do have expectations,” Tanner said. “We do not have apathy. We have expectations, and you want to try to meet them. And we’ve got one of the best ever. He’s the all-time active winningest coach in baseball, so that gives us a good chance.”
This coaching search sprawled over a week and covered a lot of ground, but nobody else on the candidate list shares nearly as much of the venn diagram with Tanner himself. The track record, the lengthy SEC tenure, the sustained consistency and even the baseball philosophies jive strongly.
Hiring the trusted assistant who knew the program inside and out did not work as Chad Holbrook’s tenure fizzled out in 2017. After that, Tanner went the mid-major route with Mark Kingston from South Florida, another stretch which had some highs but never really felt capable of launching itself into orbit.
Now for round three, after all else failed, Tanner decided his solution to pulling South Carolina baseball out of the sport’s wilderness was to hire the closest thing he could find to himself.
“I reached out to Coach Mainieri to see what he thought about some of the people that I had on my list,” Tanner said. “Knowing when I picked up the phone to call him that his name surfaced last year in a couple of other jobs.”
Mainieri retired from LSU following the 2021 season due to health problems, neck pain he had surgery on following the season and said Thursday he has felt better from every year. If the jump back into coaching was inevitable — and by all accounts he wanted to get back in — it was a matter of finding the right home.
D1Baseball’s Kendall Rogers reported that both Miami and Notre Dame had interest in him for their openings since 2021. The former another fallen blue blood, the latter the school he coached at prior to LSU.
Neither of those schools could quite persuade him to pull the plug on his retirement. But South Carolina, with all the tradition, pedigree and expectations accompanying it, finally had enough.
And of course, the other end of his phone call had a lot to do with it.
“Make no mistake about it, the reason that I came here is because of Ray Tanner,” Mainieri said. “And I mean this sincerely. What an awesome opportunity for a college baseball coach to have as his boss a good friend, one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game and a tremendous administrator.”
Mainieri needed one more place to finish his career. Tanner needed a head coach cut from a similar cloth as him to revive this hibernating program. For all the initial shock surrounding the move and the questions about how it will work out, it is almost a match made in heaven.
Whether or not either can help the other accomplish their personal goals here remains to be seen, and very legitimate questions will persist until or unless results follow. Does a winning formula from 2010 translate to 2025, transfer portal and NIL and an SEC more loaded than ever before and all? It is more than fair to doubt.
But surely, in the back of every Gamecock mind ever since his retirement, the same question has popped up every now and then.
“What would this look like if Ray still had the job?”
For better or worse, welcome to the next closest thing.
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