Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (this email) year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.
Scott Davis: Can South Carolina Baseball Be Fun Again?
It’s almost over.
The 2026 season is winding towards the finish line for South Carolina baseball, and truth be told, most of us will be ready to close the books on it and look towards better days in 2027.
Entering tonight’s series with Kentucky, the Gamecocks are limping to the end at 20-22 overall and another ugly campaign in the SEC at 5-13. After briefly coming back to life against Missouri – long the SEC’s baseball doormat – South Carolina was swept by Mississippi State and now will need to go on the mother of all runs to even make the postseason a vague, fuzzy possibility.
More than likely, even the mother of all runs won’t be enough.
Indeed, we can probably feel comfortable in acknowledging that the postseason will elude the program yet again. With each passing day, it’s becoming harder and harder to remember that this was once the most elite program in college baseball.
If you’re a longtime fan like me, it may feel like the Ray Tanner glory days just happened.
And yet a quick glance at the calendar reveals that it’s now been 15 years since the Gamecocks won their second and last national championship under Tanner.
If you’re a freshman at South Carolina right now, you have no tangible memories of this program being anything other than mediocre (and occasionally dreadful).
The golden age is so far behind us, in fact, that Tanner has now concluded his run in the job for which he left the dugout. He spent 12 long years as the university’s athletic director before retiring in 2024, never finding a fix for the program he’d taken to the top of the mountain.
The task will now be up to his successor, Jeremiah Donati, to try and solve when he looks for a new head baseball coach during the offseason.
It won’t be an easy one.
This is no longer an elite baseball program. And it’s lacking more than just wins.
It’s lacking personality, zest and swagger.
More than anything, South Carolina baseball used to be fun. But those fun days have been gone for a long time.
Sliding Into the Gray
If there’s an alarming characteristic that both the South Carolina baseball program and its counterpart in men’s basketball have shared for much of the last decade, it’s this: They’ve lacked charisma.
In short, it’s easy to forget about them. Both programs seem to be running in black-and-white rather than technicolor, lacking confident and memorable leaders, star power on the rosters, and intriguing storylines and narratives that fans can follow.
It’s as though baseball and men’s basketball both are suffused in gray. There’s just no vibrancy or vitality surrounding them, no real identity, nothing that fans can cling to and rally around even when times are challenging.
To an extent, the identity of a program trickles down from the person in charge of it.
Tanner wasn’t necessarily an electric personality, but he was a confident, calming force in the dugout. He cared about his players and they cared about him, but he also demanded and held their respect. Off the diamond, he had a folksy, country boy vibe that played well in the Palmetto State.
Tanner was an old-school coach, but as a great leader, he realized during the 2010 season that his team needed a looser structure – he allowed and ultimately encouraged his players to have a little fun playing the game (remember that as the year when goofy stuff like the Avatar Spirit Stick thrived).
With the pressure off, the team enjoyed themselves all the way to Omaha, where they won the national championship.
That spirit of fun and excitement and “anything might happen tonight” adventure has been all but absent since Tanner’s retirement. And the next coach will need to deliver a dramatic change to the team’s overall identity if he is to restore it.
Coach Sets the Tone
If we can agree that a program’s identity flows downward from the top, then it’s useful to take a look at the three men who’ve led the program since Tanner ascended into the AD’s office (this excludes the current interim coach, Monte Lee, who was handed an almost impossible task in trying to pick the pieces of a program in total disarray at midseason this year).
Tanner’s first replacement, Chad Holbrook, was his hand-picked successor and longtime top lieutenant. Gamecock fans were almost universally in favor of the hire, and in hindsight, the Holbrook years represent the high-water mark for South Carolina baseball in the post-Ray Era.
Because Holbrook was so closely associated with Tanner, though, it was hard for him to put his own stamp on the program, and he ultimately felt a bit like a Ray Jr. to most fans – Ray Tanner, Part Two, only…not as many wins. Maybe a fresh start was the answer?
It wasn’t.
The next coach, Mark Kingston, served as a harbinger of things to come. Kingston lacked the personal magnetism you hope to see in your top coaches – it just didn’t fire you up to listen to him talk about his team. The warm-and-fuzzies weren’t there. And in a grim sign for what the future would hold, Gamecock players didn’t seem to be having much fun playing baseball during his many years in the dugout.
But all of that served as a mere appetizer for what befell the program under Paul Mainieri. If Kingston lacked charisma, Mainieri seemed to actively invite scorn: It simply wasn’t easy to like him. When reports flourished towards the end of the 2025 season that Mainieri’s players had turned on him and that many were miserable at South Carolina, few fans were surprised.
In truth, there has never been a less fun season of Gamecock baseball than Mainieri’s one full campaign in 2025.
Way back in 2010, in the heyday of the Avatar Spirit Stick, we never could have imagined that South Carolina baseball would become so joyless, colorless, devoid of life and vitality.
But it did.
That’s why the next coach will need more than new players.
He’ll need to build an entirely new identity, one that reminds us that baseball is supposed to be fun.
Tell me what you think is next for South Carolina baseball by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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