The long road back — and ahead — for the Notre Dame baseball program
Editor’s Note: This is the third story in our four-part Big Picture Series that will focus on various aspects of the Notre Dame athletic program from the vantage point of Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
PART I
State of the football program and the growth of first-year head coach Marcus Freeman
PART II
College sports’ emergence from pandemic abatement to pressure to join an arms race
► PART III
ND’s evolution into a national baseball power and its commitment to its sustainability
PART IV
ND’s place in the NIL space and navigating a rapidly evolving college sports model
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For three days, as April turned to May, coach Paul Mainieri and 23 players from Notre Dame’s 2002 College World Series team returned to campus to celebrate and remember when the Irish baseball program was as good as it’s ever been.
The special reunion included taking in a three-game series with Boston College in which the current ND baseball team was engaged.
What the 64-year-old and now retired Mainieri saw in person on the field matched up with his impressions from a distance. A college baseball sleeping giant had awakened but so had some of the heartache that was baked into the experience during his own 12-year run at ND.
“The players, when I watch them play, make me think back to the players from my era,” said Mainieri, who, after nine NCAA Tourney runs in 12 seasons, left to revive a stagnant LSU program in the summer of 2006.
“The way that they played the game — hard-hosed, scrappy, competitive, good defense, good pitching. And with a coach, like Link Jarrett, who knows how to do it.
“But I’m afraid if they don’t support the program a little bit better with some maybe capital improvements or whatever they need to do, a coach like Link — he’s not threatening to leave. He’s never said anything to me. But it’s hard to retain a great coach if he feels like he’s fighting the battle alone.”
Last season, after Jarrett coaxed the Irish to within a game of the College World Series, his name came up in the conversation to replace the retiring Mainieri at LSU. Then hours after Clemson canned coach Mitch Lee this week, Jarrett was being framed as a “home run” replacement.
And so three seasons into a baseball renaissance — the first of which was truncated 13 games in because of the COVID-19 pandemic — Notre Dame stands at a crossroads.
“It’s working now, and I’m not going to jump to the assumption that it can’t continue to work,” Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said. “But as with all our programs, we’re always asking ourselves, ‘What do we need to do? Where do we need to make investments?’ And we will do that with baseball.
“And one of the great things is that Link’s success and his leadership has caused more people to want to be supportive of the program, which helps us.”
Building sustained success at a place where mitigating climate, geography and limits in missed class time are constant and formidable challenges has to be offset, though, by fixing the other parts of the program that don’t appear broken from the outside looking in at the moment.
Symbolically and pragmatically, the Notre Dame administration can look at the NCAA Tournament selection committee’s snub of sending a clear top 16 team on the road — specifically Statesboro, Ga., as a No. 2 seed in that four-team regional — as a wake-up call or accept there’s a glass ceiling it’s unwilling to fight through.
Notre Dame (35-14) opens Friday at 2 p.m. EDT against regional 3 seed Texas Tech (37-20), with No. 1 regional seed/16 national seed/host Georgia Southern (40-18) taking on 4 seed UNC-Greensboro (34-28) at 7 p.m. All games at 3,000-seat J.I. Clements Stadium are sold out.
The survivor of the double-elimination regional advances to the Super Regional round next week likely against and hosted by the overwhelming favorite to win this year’s national title, No. 1 Tennessee (53-7).
That’s Notre Dame’s gateway to the eight-team College World Series in Omaha, Neb., a year after facing eventual national champ Mississippi State on the road in a similar scenario.
“I texted Link (Monday after the bracket reveal),” Mainieri said in a phone interview this week. “And I told him, ‘When you got the job, I told you that there were a lot of things that you were going to have to overcome. And this is one of them.’”
Mainieri’s 2002 team is living proof Notre Dame is capable of rising to the occasion. That Irish team did host a regional, but it got to the College World Series by going through seemingly invincible No. 1 Florida State in Tallahassee, beating the Seminoles two games out of three.
FSU was 59-12 that season and on a 25-game winning streak when the Irish arrived. Ironically, Jarrett, a former Seminole shortstop, saw it unfold in person. He was part of the radio broadcast team.
“I told Link that it means more when you have to do it the hard way,” Mainieri said. “In ‘02, we had to do it the hard way, and it meant so much to our players because it was so hard. What's done is done. You just have to overcome it now.”
Oregon State is a rare example of a Northern school that does that with some regularity. Under now-retired coach Pat Casey, the Beavers won a national title in 2006, then again in 2007 — as an unranked team — and a third time in 2018, Casey’s final season.
The current Oregon State team (44-15) opens regional play at its home field in Corvallis as the No. 3 overall national seed.
“The NCAA committee sent us to Corvallis for a regional in 2018, when I was at LSU,” Mainieri said. “Their facilities are better than Notre Dame’s, but they’re not spectacular. I looked around and was like ‘Man, why would kids want to come here?’
“So anything is possible if you have the right leadership. When you have support from the administration and you don’t get raw deals from the (NCAA Tourney) selection committee, it makes it a little bit easier. But nothing is impossible. They’ve proven that at Oregon State.”
Had the LSU job not come open after the 2006 season, Manieri is convinced he would have finished his career at Notre Dame.
The Hall-of-Famer, who coached at St. Thomas University and the Air Force Academy before coming to ND, said he turned down seven job offers prior to the LSU opportunity, including four from other SEC schools and two in the Big 12.
“I had no intention of ever leaving Notre Dame. I loved it there,” Mainieri said. “It was just that one school, LSU, where I had actually attended and met my wife as a freshman and I had so many special friends.
“I remember it was the year after (Hurricane) Katrina had hit and had destroyed the whole area. And the baseball program was kind of sputtering along. In a weird kind of way, I felt like it was a calling to me to help in the recovery down here if I could restore the pride in the baseball program that maybe would help the recovery of the whole area.
“I know it sounds crazy but what else can a baseball coach do? If you could restore the baseball program to a prideful entity, that was one way to help. Honestly, it was the only job for which I would have left Notre Dame. And how often is that job offered to you? That kind of thing rarely ever comes to pass. In this case, it happened.”
Initially, Mainieri even tried to talk then-athletic director Skip Bertman out of hiring him.
“If I hadn’t taken the job, I just think I would have regretted it,” he said. “Not taking my shot, given all the resources and everything else you have down here, to see if I could coach a team to a national championship.”
In 2008, the same year Swarbrick replaced Kevin White as Notre Dame’s athletic director, Mainieri had the five-time national championship LSU program back in the College World Series. In year three, 2009, he led the Tigers to their sixth national title.
And Notre Dame literally slid off the college baseball map. In the 13 years between Mainieri and Jarrett, the Irish amassed five winning seasons and one NCAA Tournament appearance (2015).
“People don’t realize how hard it is to get into the NCAA Tournament,” said Mainieri, 533-213-3 (.714) during his time at ND. “And then the program stagnated, including its commitment to facilities.
“When Frank Eck Stadium was built (1994), Pat Murphy was the coach. They played in it for one year before I became the head coach. And Frank Eck Stadium was considered the nicest field in the Midwest.
“Well, what has happened is you have new stadiums popping up everywhere. And the stadium at Notre Dame is somewhat antiquated. And in order for them to stay up with the Joneses, so to speak, they need to make some improvements.
“Quite frankly, at the end of my 12 years, I was trying to get some of those improvements done, and I was kind of running into a brick wall trying to get those done. And I took the job at LSU for the reasons I told you, but at the same time, it was frustrating to me that the administration didn’t want to support baseball more than it was supporting it.
“That’s why I felt there was a limit on how much we can accomplish and how great we could be. Now that they have a coach like Link Jarrett, one of the top coaches in the country, they have a second chance to do it right by fully committing to baseball.”
What that looks like beyond upgrading physical facilities is making competitive financial bids for the Super Regionals, promoting attendance in a town where the minor-league South Bend Cubs compete for local baseball fans, flying commercial less and charters more, and if/when scholarship deregulation becomes reality, increasing those to attract more top-tier players.
It also means being aggressive and flexible when it comes to midweek games. The NCAA selection committee admitted it dinged ND for its number of weather-related cancellations. The Irish, ranked 13th in the RPI and with the second-best record in all of college baseball against the top 50 (14-7), played the second-fewest number of games of any team in the NCAA Tourney field (49) to Ivy League champ Columbia’s 46..
So playing some midweek double-headers when the weather is good and finding opponents willing to play on short notice can be ways to give the selection committee less reason to send Notre Dame on the long road to Omaha in future years.
After Notre Dame got overlooked for a top 8 national seed last year and Super Regional hosting privileges, Swarbrick was confident there wouldn’t be Selection Monday shock this year. Until there was.
“I’m never ever surprised by what that committee does,” Mainieri offered. “It's not transparent at all. I think we got a bid in nine of my 12 years at Notre Dame. And two of the three years that we did not get a bid, I thought was a terrible injustice.
“This year there was no ACC representation on the committee. That couldn’t have helped Notre Dame. Even all the anti-Notre Dame people there are in the country, even they are talking about how Notre Dame got a raw deal. It’s that obvious.
“And even at LSU, one year we were 36-20 and an RPI of 21 and didn’t get a bid. So dealing with the results of that committee was one of the more frustrating things in my coaching career.”
Two neck surgeries in an 11-month span eventually nudged Mainieri to retire after last season with 1,508 career victories. Instead of attending the SEC Tournament last week, he spent roughly 20 hours that week playing in the pool with his grandkids.
When the Tigers and Irish begin regional play on Friday, he’ll be golfing in Omaha with his best friend.
“It’s been the strangest time of my life, to be honest with you,” he said. “Emotionally, it’s weird. I just felt like I needed to retire, because I was in such pain. The stress and tension of the job, I think, was adding to my neck not recovering.
“I just could hardly make it through a day. It was purely a physical thing. I feel better now. But I don’t think I would have felt better if I didn’t take the time off.”
No matter what the circumstances, though, he’s made time to return to Notre Dame on a regular basis.
“It’s rare if I go a full year and don’t go back to Notre Dame, visiting,” he said. “I still have so many friends there. Every time I go there, it feels like I’m coming home. My time there was so special to me.
“This fall I came up for a (practice) game, and Link Jarrett asked me to come out to the field and I spoke to the team. And it was such a thrill for me, because it was the first time I had spoken to the Notre Dame baseball team in 16 years.
“I literally had tears in my eyes, because it meant that much to me. And I told them, when they got to Omaha this year — I used the term when — I’m going to be there rooting them on. And I still think they can get there.
“That’s how good they are. That’s how good this program has a chance to be.
“Again.”
NCAA TOURNAMENT
Statesboro Regional Schedule
(All Times Eastern)
Friday, June 3
Game 1: #2 Notre Dame vs. #3 Texas Tech, 2 p.m. (ACC Network)
Game 2: #1 Georgia Southern vs. #4 UNCG, 7 p.m. (ESPN+)
Saturday, June 4
Game 3: Game 1 Loser vs. Game 2 Loser, 1 p.m.
Game 4: Game 1 Winner vs. Game 2 Winner, 7 p.m.
Sunday, June 5
Game 5: Game 3 Winner vs. Game 4 Loser, 2 p.m.
Game 6: Game 5 Winner vs. Game 4 Winner, 7 p.m.
Monday, June 6
Game 7: Game 6 Winner vs. Game 6 Loser, 6 p.m.
(if necessary)
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