Column: Ray Tanner, South Carolina need home run hire in 3rd baseball coaching search

The expectation at South Carolina is to win. Everyone knows it. Anything short of that is a failure.

In what will be a 12th straight season of not going to Omaha, South Carolina is making a drastic change. One day after the 2024 campaign ended, Mark Kingston was relieved from his duties after leading the program for seven years.

With the the transfer portal opening on Monday, athletics director Ray Tanner was quick to the punch to move on from Kingston. That’s a good sign as this process needs to get moving right along.

As the search begins, Tanner will have the challenge of hiring the right man to get the Gamecocks back to the College World Series. He’s had two opportunities to do so in the past after he resigned from coaching after 2012. It’s safe to say both of those previous hires didn’t pan out. But he’s going to have a third shot to do right.

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First, there was Chad Holbrook, who was an assistant on Tanner’s staff from 2009-12. If you talk to anyone who watched Gamecock baseball during those years, they’d tell you Holbrook was the no-brainer choice.

However, it quickly became one of those situations where it was the right move but it just didn’t work out as intended. Holbrook made it within one win of going to Omaha in 2013 after losing in a Super Regional to UNC. But over the next four seasons, he’d miss the postseason twice and lose a Super at Founders Park.

After Holbrook’s tenure ended in 2017, in came Kingston. He wasn’t exactly a well-known name, with his best season being a 42-win year at USF in 2017. But it looked like it was going to be a strong hire, just like Holbrook, after Kingston made it to Super Regionals and lost in the deciding game to head to Omaha in 2018.

The similarities with Holbrook and Kingston don’t end there, though. The year after his strong first season, South Carolina finished well under .500 in SEC play and missed the postseason, something he’d do again 2022. Only this time, the Gamecocks would have an overall losing record for the first time since 1996.

And if that weren’t a big enough coincidence, both coaches finished 13-17 in SEC play in their final year. The only difference was that Kingston made the postseason in 2024. But still, the end result was the same.

So now in his third time up to the plate, Tanner is 0-for-2. To be fair, neither of those previous hires were “bad” per se, they just couldn’t do what Tanner could when he was a head coach, which was getting back to Omaha. With this upcoming hiring process, Tanner doesn’t need just to get on base, he needs to hit a home run.

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How is he going to do that? Well, it starts with South Carolina not limiting his options. In order to make the best hire possible, Tanner needs to be able to spend as much money as he needs. For this current season, the highest paid coach in the SEC was Vanderbilt’s Tim Corbin, who was making $2.4 million. Kingston made $600,000 this year.

That’s not to say Tanner should have to or be allowed to overpay a head coach. But if it comes down to forking out a little extra cash to get the guy he thinks can do what Holbrook and Kingston couldn’t, it has to be done.

It’s not just about spending money, though. He also needs to identify who the right coach for the job will be. Outside of baseball, he took a chance on Lamont Paris, who led Gamecock men’s basketball to the NCAA Tournament in just his second season. In smaller sports, volleyball head coach Tom Mendoza has taken South Carolina to the tournament in three of five seasons.

But when it comes to baseball, there’s a little more pressure to get it right. And that’s probably because of his background as a great baseball mind with 30-plus years of coaching experience. So he gets it.

Luckily, he should have a lot of great options to choose from. South Carolina will be an intriguing destination with a winning tradition, which will be appeasing for a lot of good coaches in college baseball. Again, it’s going to come down to Tanner’s judgement and if the University is willing to do what it takes.

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