LSU Baseball Coach Paul Mainieri Announces Retirement
Multiple reports from Baton Rouge started the day by saying that LSU Head Baseball Coach Paul Mainieri will be retiring at the end of the 2021 baseball season. A season that may have already ended with LSU's first round loss in the SEC Tournament. The team will have to hope that this announcement will sway the NCAA Selection Committee to add LSU from the bubble, into the tournament, for the season to continue.
Those reports were all confirmed today by LSU's Athletic Department, who announced that Mainieri will be stepping aside at the end of the season. In a statement from the LSU Athletic Department, Mainieri said:
"I have been the luckiest guy in the world to have lived out a childhood dream of becoming a college baseball coach. I've worked at four wonderful institutions, and it's been the honor of my life to have served as the head coach at LSU for 15 years. To have carried the torch of a program built by Skip Bertman, the greatest college baseball coach of all time, has been a tremendous privilege. It has always been my unwavering goal to sustain the excellence that was created here."
If LSU isn't selected for the NCAA Tournament, Mainieri will leave the game with the 7th most win in NCAA Division 1 Baseball history, 1,501. He coached 6 seasons at St. Thomas, 6 seasons at Air Force, 12 seasons at Notre Dame, and 15 season at LSU.
He won a National Championship in 2009, won National Coach of the Year Awards in 2009 (two of them that year) and in 2015. He also won SEC Coach of the Year honors those two seasons.
His teams won 6 SEC Tournaments, 5 Big East Tournaments, 4 SEC Regular Season Titles, and 4 Big East Regular Season Titles.