BASEBALL PREVIEW: Home Run Hire

Bertman reached way back for a coach for the future

By Carl Dubois
Tiger Rag Associate Editor

Attendance at LSU baseball games was in sharp decline. In 2005, the Tigers failed to win a regional for the first time in 11 seasons. A year later, LSU missed the postseason for the first time in 18 seasons.

Six seasons came and went without a victory in Omaha. Skip Bertman had a problem.

He fired Smoke Laval, the person he picked to succeed him in 2002 as coach of the Tigers, and now Bertman had to find a coach to return LSU to national prominence.

Bertman needed to knock one out of the park. After a few swings of the bat, including conversations with former LSU assistants Mike Bianco and Jim Wells, already successful SEC coaches, Bertman reached into his past to choose Paul Mainieri from Notre Dame.

A return to the College World Series in 2008 - along with the program’s first win there in eight years - and a national championship a year later was evidence of a home run hire. Bertman, it seemed, was capable of Gorilla Ball too. Sitting in his office in January, he said he couldn’t be happier about his choice of Mainieri in June 2006.

“He’s done exactly what we’ve asked him to do,” Bertman said of the coach he’s known since Mainieri was a schoolboy attending Bertman’s baseball camps in Miami decades ago.

Mainieri’s father, Demie, was coach at Miami-Dade Community College when Bertman was coach at Miami Beach High School. Demie Mainieri coached future big leaguers Steve Carlton and Mickey Rivers, among others, and built a junior college powerhouse.

Bertman began sending players to Miami-Dade, and he got to know the Mainieri family. Paul, a small but scrappy shortstop, learned from his father and Bertman. Paul Mainieri played one season at LSU (1976), then played at Miami-Dade when he realized it would be his father’s last season as a coach.

He finished college with two years at UNO.

He became a high school coach in south Florida, then a college coach at St. Thomas University. The Air Force, which fields a team with players on campus by appointment, not because of the usual recruiting, hired Mainieri and saw its program rise to new heights.

In spite of the usual cold-weather difficulties and a school policy against recruiting junior college players, Mainieri spent 12 seasons at Notre Dame and had more 40-win seasons (11) than any other coach outside a Sun Belt state. He won conference championships.

Bertman considered him as his successor for 2002, but the timing wasn’t right for several reasons. In 2006, Bertman and Mainieri began talking seriously about making it happen.

Mainieri said Bertman wasn’t going to entrust LSU’s baseball program to someone just because he was a family friend.

“He obviously had a very important responsibility in hiring the coach that he felt could do the job,” Mainieri said.

Still, Bertman knew Mainieri’s upbringing, the coach he learned the game from, the men he was influenced by - including UNO coach Ron Maestri - and those things became factors in the hiring.

Bertman and Mainieri worked it out, and the new coach announced his goal to return LSU baseball to the top.

“I came here with a lot of confidence,” Mainieri said, “and it was important to me to make Skip proud, and I hope I have.”

Bertman said Mainieri has done precisely that, and not just by winning. Mainieri raises money, gives speeches, is fan-friendly and cultivates the same attitude in his players.

Coaching in Bertman’s shadow would have been daunting for many. John Wooden had an office down the hall after Gene Bartow succeeded him as basketball coach at UCLA. Woody Hayes loomed large over successor Earle Bruce.

Mainieri didn’t have the problems they had.

“I’m not intimidated by Skip,” Mainieri said, “because I’ve known him for so long. Skip has a pretty powerful presence, and obviously he has strong opinions about a lot of things, and if I disagreed with his opinions, I felt very comfortable to be able to speak frankly with him because of having known him for so many years and having our relationship go back so far.”

Mainieri said he knew Bertman was a good man who cared about the right things and would help him succeed as much as possible.

Bertman said he knew the LSU job was Mainieri’s dream job, and he knew he was the right choice.

“He was the perfect fit for us to be here at LSU at the right time that he came here,” Bertman said.

There’s no telling for sure how their shared past helped make it a good fit, but it’s obvious there is mutual affection.

“As you can tell,” Bertman said, “I love Paul, but I loved him before he was a winner. You know what I mean. I always loved him.”

Looking back on the hire, Bertman sees how everything clicked into place.

“It’s one of these perfect honeymoon situations that rolls through life,” he said, “and you say, ‘Oh, what a break.’ ”

Read more from the 2010 Baseball Preview: 

MAINIERI PROFILE: Year 3 continued amazing run

DUBOIS COLUMN: Turning the page fun for us, essential for Tigers

Carl Dubois is Tiger Rag’s lead LSU baseball writer. Contact him at carl@tigerrag.com.