As the final strike crossed home plate, Mark Kingston sat at the front of the dugout and watched on.
His eyes were covered by his black Under Armour sunglasses. There was not much of an expression, if any at all, on his face. He just sat there and looked on.
That was the look of a head coach who saw his team’s season end in a way much like years past. South Carolina, fighting to stay alive, was shutout 2-0 by James Madison on Sunday in the Raleigh Regional.
“At that point, you don’t think about yourself,” Kingston said. “You don’t think about anything other than the players that you’re in charge of in that dugout and that disappointment they’re about to feel. And you just just wish you could do anything to help them. All you can do at that point is try to give them perspective.”
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The Gamecocks will conclude the 2024 campaign with a 37-25 record. And with Kingston’s contract buyout dropping in half to $400,000, his future in Columbia will almost certainly be up in the air.
Despite another year of no Omaha, Kingston called this year a “good season but always looking to have a great season.” In the moments after the season ended, he said he feels he has the support of the USC administration to get the program to where it needs to be.
“I think every program in the country wants to keep getting better. We’re no different,” Kingston said. “The SEC is filled with teams that are dumping huge resources in, and I think it’s just a matter of we need to continue to do everything we can to try to give this program what it needs to be successful. There’s so many parts of are programs that are in great shape. But obviously, we need to keep getting better.”
As for the game itself, things were about as bleak as it could be for the Gamecocks. South Carolina struggled all day at the plate and couldn’t manage to get any runs across against JMU reliever Dominic Burke, who hurled 6.2 shutout innings.
“(Burke) just threw a lot of strikes. He had his stuff, obviously,” Ethan Petry said. “We were just trying to do too much on a guy that didn’t have a lot of velocity. And we just tried to over swing, and when you try to over swing, your swing gets slower. We just didn’t do our job.”
On the day, South Carolina 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position and 0-for-6 with two outs. The offense only struck out seven times but also hit .172 as a team, scraping together five hits in the loss.
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It was a rough weekend in general for the offense, though. It wasn’t just a Sunday problem. In total, the Gamecocks went 0-for-20 with RISP and 5-for-38 with runners on in regional play.
As a result, a strong outing from Dylan Eskew was wasted.
After a 33-pitch first inning which included giving up a solo homer, it looked like his start would be brief. But to his credit, he worked in and out of jams and continued to be sent back out.
The right-hander ended up working through into the sixth and gave his team more than enough of a shot. He tossed 5.1 strong innings and gave up one run on four hits. He struck out two and walked two on 88 pitches.
“I felt good. Just tried to give the team everything I had with our backs against the wall,” Eskew said.
Still without any run support from the offense, Tyler Pitzer came in after Eskew and pitched well for most of his outing. But a one-out solo homer in the eighth to Mike Mancini, his second of the day, concluded Pitzer’s outing and thus put the game out of reach for the Gamecocks.
“Reason we lost today was just we didn’t score runs, that guy had our number,” Kingston said. “And it’s disappointing when that happens, but baseball makes that happen sometimes.”
Up next: South Carolina will head into the offseason with plenty of important decisions to make. The Gamecocks will be back in action in February 2025 for Opening Day next season, potentially with a lot of change.
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