Kentucky Wildcats baseball was selected as the No. 2 overall seed in the NCAA tournament, the highest such ranking in the program’s history. As a reward for their hard work throughout the 2024 campaign, Kentucky will host a regional tournament for the second straight season under head coach Nick Mingione.
As the Wildcats gear up for the first game of the Lexington regional against Western Michigan on Friday, their head coach took a moment to share his feelings about their historic 2024 run.
“It feels great. [I’m] proud of our guys,” Mingione said. Obviously, you’ve heard me say this over and over, but we just want to keep doing things that have never been done before. And that’s kind of been our calling since we’ve been here— in 2017 and another opportunity to do that again this year. So, [I’m] proud of the guys for them getting rewarded for all their hard work, executing, and winning at a really high level.
Kentucky finished this year as the SEC’s co-regular season champs, sharing the title with the Tennessee volunteers after finishing conference play with a 22-8 record. The Wildcats finished the year with an overall record of 40-14 and an RPI rank of No. 3.
This season, Mingione and company are looking to add to their list of never-before-be-done events, finishing 2024 as national champions and winning the college world series.
Mingione on SEC Tournament format changing: ‘I will not miss it’
Beginning next season, the SEC Baseball Tournament will expand to 16 teams with the addition of Texas and Oklahoma into the conference. With that comes a change in the double-elimination format that the conference has used since the last realignment.
The new format will feature a simplified single-elimination format. The 9-16 seeds will battle it out in the first round, while the 5-8 seeds will play the winners of those games in the second round. The top four seeds will receive double byes.
For some coaches in the league, this is the preferred way to play the tournament.
“I will not miss it,” Kentucky baseball coach Nick Mingione said of the current format. “As a matter of fact, I will say, I will go on record and say this. The format that we’re doing is the one that I voted for. … Our conference does an amazing job with this tournament. When you just look up and down, the staff, the people, I was personally really happy that the 3 — there was no rain up to this point, and it was a 3:00 game because all the people from the grounds crew to the office to you name it, they have spent a lot of time here, and a 9:30 game was early.
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