Getting the South Carolina baseball hire right is the top priority.
Doing it in an efficient manner? That also has to be a consideration.
With the pressures of NIL and the transfer portal closing in, moving quickly on both is a requirement this time of year for even baseball programs with sitting head coaches.
For programs with a vacancy, every second that ticks by without the next coach in place could put the new guy behind when he arrives.
“If you’re South Carolina, you really got to get on the horn from an NIL perspective,” said D1Baseball‘s Kendall Rogers, one of the top national voices in the sport, as he joined the Sports Talk Media Network for an interview. “I don’t want to name names, just because if they don’t go to the portal, I don’t want to get people blowing them up. I mean, a couple of the better players are going to be going to the portal, and you really got to get on that from an NIL standpoint.
“With a coaching search in modern college baseball, you cannot afford to wait two and a half, three weeks to make a decision. By that time kids have made decisions. They’re in the portal. Things are already set up for where they’re going.”
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Luckily for South Carolina, most of the coaches that are thought to be in contention for the job, have already wrapped up their seasons.
East Carolina’s Cliff Godwin, Duke’s Chris Pollard, and Wake Forest’s Tom Walter all saw their teams’ seasons end this past weekend during regional play.
Louisville (Dan McDonnell) and Troy (Skylar Meade) did not make the Field of 64 this season. Monte Lee currently serves as the Gamecocks interim coach.
Of the names that have been largely bandied about in connection with the job, Tennessee associate head coach Josh Elander is the only one whose team is still playing. And it’s far easier for an assistant coach to interview for a job in-season than a sitting head coach.
So the opportunity to work through a process that isn’t hurried but is efficient should be there. But the pressures to do so are ever-present.
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“And I kind of go back to (LSU coach) Jay Johnson,” Roger said. “Last year in Omaha, I was sitting there talking to Jay in the hotel lobby. They’re playing for the national championship on a Friday, and he’s over there pulling his hair out, and I’m like, man, what’s wrong? And he’s like, well all these teams are getting guys out of the portal, and I’m here in Omaha, and he goes, I know I should be happy about playing for the national championship, but I’m also trying to land guys out of the portal.”
And stories like that one are just the way things are now.
“So they give you an idea, kind of allows you to pull back the curtain on what these coaches are dealing with,” Rogers said. “So time is definitely of the essence, especially in a program like Carolina, to where you want to make an immediate impact. You want to make an immediate move in that space.”
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