Erik Bakich credits Clemson seniors, Michigan transfers for helping build culture

The Clemson baseball team has improved considerably the last two years under the leadership of new coach Erik Bakich, but the success is also the product of a group of veterans who helped set the new standards in the program.

Many of them were Michigan transfers who helped lay the groundwork for Bakich to earn back-to-back regional hosting berths with the Tigers.

“We call those standards and we don’t have necessarily rules, we just have behavior standards,” Bakich explained. “This is just how you operate inside of this program, in the classroom, in the community, in training, in games, in the facility. It’s a shared language. It’s a shared mindset. The Michigan guys were a bridge to, ‘This is how it helped us at Michigan, this is how it can help us at Clemson.'”

The message clearly got through. The Michigan transfers helped set the tone, but it was readily embraced by the rest of the roster, too.

That made it possible for Clemson to very quickly turn things around in its rebuild. The team has won 44 games each of the last two seasons as a result.

The Clemson veterans locking arms with the Michigan transfers was key.

“The majority of the team is not Michigan guys, they were Clemson guys,” Bakich said. “But a Riley Bertram and a Willie Weiss and a Jimmy Obertop, these guys coming in certainly could reference where this was helpful in the past. I just, I can’t say enough to how everyone was just bought in from the start, because as coaches, culture is something that happens over a long period of time.

“We’re building our program culture right now, just like we’re making steps toward winning a national championship. But what we do daily is we have these standards which create an environment, and that environment — a training environment, a classroom environment — that environment over time, every day, shapes the culture. You need those players and the decisions and choices they make every day that shapes that environment, which ultimately builds that culture. So I just can’t thank them especially enough for upholding those standards every single day.”

Bakich was quick to credit the Clemson veterans with making his transition so smooth. After all, it’s not always that you go straight to hosting back-to-back regionals and even a Super Regional in just two years after taking a new gig.

Yet the Tigers made it look not only easy, but fun.

“Transitions are hard, they’re always hard,” Bakich said. “There’s so much talk of go get your own guys, and we just never talked like that and they never thought that and felt that. It just felt like we all became one team right away and we wouldn’t have been champions two years in a row without this senior class, and not only their performance on the field, but the way they led the entire group, the way they interacted in here, in the locker room, off the field.

“You’re talking about a group that led a team to new academic records, new community service records and then took some massive steps to restore Clemson baseball back to where it belongs on top of college baseball. We didn’t get as far as we wanted to go but we took a big step and that was directly because of the leadership of this senior class, of the captains in this group.”