Ray Tanner defends state of Gamecocks baseball after Paul Mainieri hire

Ray Tanner is the best coach in South Carolina baseball history.

He’s also making his third hire for that position in 12 years after his previous two choices failed to reach the lofty expectations Tanner himself set during his nearly two decades leading USC before transitioning to athletic director.

But no, Tanner said Thursday, he didn’t feel any pressure to right the ship or truly hit a home run during his most recent baseball coaching search, which lasted a week and ended with the Gamecocks hiring former LSU national championship-winning coach Paul Mainieri.

“I’m extremely confident that we’ve hired an outstanding coach that’s ready to go,” Tanner said after Mainieri’s introductory news conference. “As he said, he’s not interested in a three-year plan, a five-year plan. He wants to win next year.”

Mainieri, the NCAA’s active wins leader who came out of retirement to accept the job at age 66, is the 31st head coach in Gamecocks baseball history and the third since Tanner stepped down from the job and moved to AD in 2012.

After delivering South Carolina baseball six trips to Omaha and back-to-back national championships in 2010-11, Tanner has made two previous hires for the program: Chad Holbrook in 2012, and Mark Kingston in 2017.

Holbrook resigned in 2017 after missing the NCAA Tournament twice in a three-year span, and South Carolina fired Kingston earlier this month after seven seasons as his team struggled down the stretch of the regular season and bowed out in regionals.

But Tanner on Thursday pushed back against the idea that he’d made a mistake in either of those hires, and if he felt he had to nail it on a third try.

“I’m not going to tell you that I got it wrong before,” Tanner said. “I know what you’re inferring. But Chad Holbrook won a lot of games here, had some success here. So did Mark Kingston. He just came off a 37-win season. … Those guys were just a few swings away from being where they needed to be.”

Holbrook, an in-house hire and former assistant under Tanner, was 200-106 (.654) overall and 81-67 (.547) in the SEC during his five years at South Carolina, with three NCAA Tournament trips and super regional appearances in 2013 and 2016.

Kingston, formerly of South Florida, was USC’s least-winningest coach percentage-wise over the last 54 years with a 217-155 (.583) record and 83-96 (.464) SEC mark in seven seasons. He, too, reached two super regionals with the Gamecocks (2018, 2023).

“A four-game swing, a three-game swing, a big finish here or there — I don’t think of those guys and think, ‘Oh, they failed,’ ” Tanner said of Holbrook and Kingston. “I don’t think they did. They did a really good job and won a lot of games.”

South Carolina earlier in the week made Mainieri the school’s first million-dollar baseball coach, signing the 39-year coaching veteran to a five-year contract worth $1.3 million annually.

Long regarded as one of the top coaches in the sport before he retired at LSU in 2021, citing health issues, Mainieri has won 1,505 games during stints at St. Thomas, Air Force, Notre Dame and, of course, with the Tigers, where he competed against Tanner in the SEC.

“I always thought I could manage the game,” Tanner said. “I felt like that was one of my strengths. He (Mainieri) was that guy that was difficult to out-think, to out-smart. I’d see him across the way and my wheels would be spinning, his wheels would be spinning. … It seemed like any move I made, he’d counter.”

South Carolina’s athletic director said he was “ecstatic” to bring in Mainieri, a surprise candidate that few had on USC’s radar after the school initially fired Kingston one day after South Carolina was eliminated from the NCAA Tournament.

But Tanner insisted USC’s baseball program “hasn’t been horrible by any stretch of the imagination” — it’s simply “missed” on in various clutch moments or stretches that could’ve brought the Gamecocks past the super regionals and back to the College World Series, where Tanner made their garnet and black synonymous with Omaha.

“We’ve had good people running the program that did it the right way, had good players,” Tanner said of Holbrook and Kingston. “It’s a situation where I admire those two coaches that came after me. They’re still in the game, and I’m happy for them. … That’s all it was. Just not being there.”

“We do not have apathy. We have expectations, and you want to try to meet them. And you’ve got one of the best ever. He (Mainieri) is the all-time winningest active coach in baseball, so that gives us a good chance.”