How will Paul Mainieri turn around South Carolina? He’ll demand perfection

Kramer Robertson was a freshman. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and naive to the ways of LSU coach Paul Mainieri.

When Robertson stepped on campus in 2013, he wanted to make an impression. Robertson knew Alex Bregman was going to start at shortstop for the Tigers, so he wanted to grease the gears at second base. One of his first days in Baton Rouge, there was no practice but Robertson and Bregman were turning double plays on their own time.

A day later, Mainieri called the freshman into his office. Robertson was pumped. Coach must’ve seen me getting extra work, he thought. He wasn’t exactly expecting a pat on the back, but he was anticipating some form of Keep up the good work.

“Kramer, I saw you turning double plays with Alex yesterday,” Mainieri said.

“Yeah, Coach, I was out there working hard,” Robertson said, baiting a compliment.

“Yeah,” Mainieri said. “It made me want to throw up.”

“But he was right,” Robertson told The State this week. “I was doing it all wrong, and I didn’t know it at the time. It was lazy and it wasn’t right. It wasn’t going to be national-championship-esque double plays.”

After Robertson’s time at LSU, he and Mainieri stayed close. For the past few months, Robertson has had basically a standing reservation to play golf with Mainieri every Thursday. Mainieri would text Robertson over the weekend and nail down the time at the University Club.

Last weekend, though, Robertson didn’t get a text.

A few days later, he found out why.

On Tuesday, the 66-year-old Mainieri was officially named the 31st head coach in South Carolina baseball history, bringing with him a resume that includes 1,505 wins (most among active coaches), six trips to the College World Series and the 2009 national championship.

His task is simple: Return South Carolina to Omaha for the first time since 2012. He will do that, his former players say, by raising the expectations to the point that only perfection is acceptable. It will show itself on the field, but only because Mainieri demands it in every facet of his program.

Inside Paul Mainieri’s coaching style

Blake Dean, now the head coach at New Orleans, was a freshman when Mainieri left Notre Dame to take the job in Baton Rouge. The year was 2007 and Mainieri was more drill sergeant than baseball coach.

“It felt like I was joining the Marine Corps,” Dean said. “Nowadays, he probably would’ve been thrown under the jail.”

The early Mainieri workouts sound like a guy who’s training the cross-country team. Running was a punishment and Mainieri had no trouble finding reasons to punish. Late to class? Start running. Missed study hall? Time for some cardio. Stool in the locker room didn’t have the LSU logo facing outward? Change out your cleats. Shower shoes not in the right spot? Oh, baby.

It was not uncommon to see the baseball team in the football stadium, running around and charging up deck after deck, or trotting up the long trailer ramps or, even worse, lunging up the ramps.

The message was simple: How you do anything is how you do everything.

“You don’t realize it when you’re in the moment. You don’t realize it when you’re a young guy,” said Mikie Mahtook, an LSU slugger from 2009-11. “In reality, it has everything with you on the field. If you can’t do those simple tasks, how is he going to trust you to do the big things and coming up clutch?”

Mainieri wins because he does not overlook details. That includes teaching his players exactly how and where he wants them to stand for the national anthem. It extends to recruiting, where Mainieri is insistent that if a recruit ever comes on a visit, there will be no machinery around, the dirt will have just been dragged, the bases will be in and the lines will have been freshly chalked.

Perhaps 49 recruits won’t notice. But maybe one will.

And maybe that one changes everything.

Adapting to the sport in 2024

Some of these tactics, his former players admit, might not be possible in 2024. It is difficult to maintain a drill-sergeant status when your entire team can be in the transfer portal 10 seconds after the season ends. But they also say Mainieri lightened up in his later years at LSU.

He needed to be intense those first few seasons to: (1) Make sure the expectation of perfection was crystal clear and (2) weed out the players who weren’t working to achieve that. After a while, the groundwork is set and the new crop of guys follow the example set by the old guard.

Goal No. 1 for Mainieri at South Carolina might be putting that in place.

“He’ll come in and obviously put down his expectations and rules while being firm and hard on them,” Dean said. “But at the same time, definitely, a lot more lax than it used to be.”

Robertson caught Mainieri just around the midpoint of the coach’s tenure in Baton Rouge. He did not always appreciate Mainieri’s tactics. He did not love Mainieri standing behind him during every pre-practice, strongly critiquing his technique fielding grounders. He did not love feeling like whatever he did wasn’t ever enough.

He didn’t appreciate it until he did, until one day the light bulb came on and he was actually doing everything correctly — doing it nearly perfect without even thinking.

That is the joy of the old-school coach like Mainieri. If you can withstand the villain for a few years, they become your hero. They become “the most important coach in my life,” Robertson said.

And he should know about old-school coaches. Robertson’s mother is Kim Mulkey, the hard-nosed women’s basketball coach who led LSU to the 2023 national championship. She is as demanding as she is relentless. Her style — brash, bold and unapologetic — is offputting to many fans and, yet, she is beloved by the majority of her players.

“I’ve said the same thing about playing for my mom,” Robertson said. “Playing for Paul Mainieri is not for everybody. And that’s OK because excellence isn’t for everybody and winning isn’t for everybody.”