Mike Bianco gives heartfelt message on what made 2022 Ole Miss team special
The Ole Miss baseball team – fresh off its first NCAA Championship in program history – had a season that had every bit of drama, heartbreak, adulation and success that would sell out theaters around the country – and head coach Mike Bianco wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“What a neat job I have to be around these guys. I mean it,” Bianco said following the national title victory. “Just great kids, great representatives of our university. They play this game at a very, very high level. They’re just good guys.
“We’ve had great leadership, as I mentioned earlier, and just to watch them do this – I shared with them, and I said it several times now, life is tough, and there’s bad things that happen to everybody. Good people, bad things happen. These guys have worked really hard, and I think they’ve showed a lot of people that you can fall down, you can stumble and you can fail, but that doesn’t mean you’re a failure. If you continue to work hard, you continue to push and you continue to believe, as Tim [Elko] said, you can accomplish anything.”
That isn’t just some movie quote or tweet from Bianco for motivation – him and his Rebels lived that reality every day over the course of the season. The Rebels fell to a point where not a lot of people believed that they were any good anymore – and a lot of people are now being forced to eat their words.
Bianco’s squad took the mid-season criticisms on the chin where they continued to push and eventually it paid off.
“I think that’s why you had 20,000-plus fans show up here, because this is a special group. They knew it was a special group. It wasn’t just a national championship. I honestly believe that. During the trophy presentation, when you look in the stands, the stadium holds 25,000, and it looked almost still packed,” Bianco said. “That’s how many fans we had here.”
With that many Ole Miss faithful backing their Rebels all season long, it was a rewarding feeling for Bianco to see the fans and his athletes after winning the national title.
“This group of young men, I think people have fallen in love with them, their story and where they come from. They had a lot of people rooting for them, and not just Ole Miss fans,” Bianco said. “I can’t – I’ve gotten so many texts over the last couple weeks from a lot of our rivals, a lot of the people that we compete against every single day that says they’re pulling for us, that they’ve fallen in love with this story and these guys.
“I’m just, again, as I said at the very beginning, very fortunate to have been a part of it and let those guys allow me to be on the ride with them.”