All he does is win; Paul Mainieri set to continue winning ways at South Carolina starting this weekend
South Carolina baseball hired Paul Mainieri this offseason to replace Mark Kingston. Kingston, after seven years at the helm in Columbia, didn’t meet the lofty expectations that come with leading the Gamecocks. Mainieri, though, is optimistic that he can be the man that returns USC to its winning ways.
His track record says that his optimism is well-placed. Simply put, all Paul Mainieri has done as a college baseball coach is win.
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Starting off at the Division-II level at St. Thomas University, Mainieri led the Bobcats for six seasons. During his time in South Florida, he fielded four top-10 teams and posted a winning percentage around 60%. Mainieri also broke the program record for single-season and career wins. He has since been inducted into the school’s athletics Hall of Fame.
When Mainieri made the jump to Division-I ball, it was at the Air Force Academy. It is no easy feat to win games at a service academy. Since starting its baseball program in 1957, Air Force has won at least 27 games in a season less than 20% of the time. Despite taking over a program with that history (and one that had won just 73 total games in the previous four seasons combined), Mainieri led the Falcons to a pair of 27-win campaigns, a program record for conference victories, and a nation-leading mark in batting average in 1994.
Notre Dame hired Mainieri in 1995 to lead a Fighting Irish team that had only been to the NCAA Tournament five times since 1964 and that had never advanced out of a Regional during that time. Even though he had to overcome the obstacle of playing the beginning of every season on the road (it’s cold in South Bend, Indiana in February and early March), Mainieri led the Irish to the tournament nine times in 12 seasons and won at least 40 games 11 times. Notre Dame went to the College World Series for the first time since 1957 under his direction, too.
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His crowning achievement as a coach, though, came at LSU. Taking over the Bayou Bengals in 2007, Mainieri led the team to Omaha in his second season, the first of five trips they would make together to the College World Series. In 2009, LSU won the National Championship. It was the high-water mark of an excellent tenure in Baton Rouge that also included nine trips to Super Regionals and six SEC Tournament titles.
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Overall, Paul Mainieri is seventh all-time in Division-I history in wins. That makes him the active leader in wins, too. His collective coaching record at the D-I level equals a 66.8% winning percentage. He is first, second, or third on the all-time wins lists at all four of his coaching stops.
A proven winner for 40 years, Mainieri officially begins his final coaching stop this Friday as South Carolina hosts the Sacred Heart Pioneers for a three-game series at Founders Park. It will be USC fans’ first opportunity to see the Mainieri-led Gamecocks in real game action. If his past successes are any indication, this weekend could be the start of something special in Columbia.
Senior Dylan Eskew will start Friday’s game one, a 4:00 p.m. first pitch. Senior lefty Matthew Becker will follow him at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. Then, sophomore lefty Jake McCoy will take the bump at Noon for Sunday’s finale. All three games will be streamed on SEC Network+.
