LSU’s return to the top of college baseball leads the sport’s growth in Louisiana

NEW ORLEANS – When Jay Johnson was coaching college baseball at San Diego, Nevada and Arizona he didn’t “waste time” recruiting the state of Louisiana.

It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the quality of talent in the Bayou State; in fact, he said Monday that Louisiana is among the top handful of states in terms of producing college baseball talent.

But he said he eventually “crossed off” Louisiana from the list of states to recruit because he learned that all the best players from here were going to LSU.

Now that Johnson is entering his third season as the Tigers’ head coach he doesn’t have any trouble getting top-flight recruits from Louisiana.

“I’m super proud of the brand baseball that we play,” Johnson said as the keynote speaker at the second annual Greater New Orleans Quarterback Club Baseball Bash at The Cannery.

Johnson was joined as a speaker by the head coaches from Tulane, UNO, Xavier, Dillard, SUNO, Loyola, SLU, Nicholls, Delgado and Nunez as well as by several high-school baseball coaches in the audience.

Johnson recalled when he was associate head coach at San Diego and recruited right-hander Kevin Gausman, whom he and many others considered the best high-school pitcher in the country.

Though Gausman’s home in Centennial, Colorado was a long way from Baton Rouge, when Gausman told Johnson he was being recruited by LSU the assistant coach “never called again.”

Now Johnson said that he feels like an official Louisianian for three reasons. He’s from Oroville, California, which he said is in an area of the Golden State that’s “just like Louisiana,” so much so that it “survived a hurricane two years ago.”

Also about a month ago LSU athletic director Scott Woodward took him duck hunting.

Additionally – and most significantly – “winning a national championship is pretty important at LSU” and he took care of that by leading the Tigers to their seventh national championship last June.

“I think that checks all the boxes,” Johnson quipped.

He said the key to last year’s success was the team doing “common things in an uncommon way” as well as navigating “a 56-game playoff” as he referred to the regular season.

Johnson emphasized to his team tat LSU doesn’t automatically have “a right” to an NCAA tournament berth.

So the Tigers approached each game of the regular-season schedule and the SEC tournament – as well as the NCAA tournament, once they got there – with a degree of competitiveness that couldn’t be matched “by the people in the other dugout.”

“Every game meant as much as it possibly could,” Johnson said.

LSU swept the Baton Rouge regional, defeating Tulane once and OregonState twice, before sweeping Kentucky in the Baton Rouge super regional.

“We could have beaten the Yankees (in Alex Box Stadium) as focused and determined as our team was,” Johnson said.

The Tigers won their College World Series opener against Tennessee before losing a one-run game to Wake Forest for their first NCAA tournament loss.

Johnson said after the loss it took the team “about 30 seconds in the dugout” to mentally move on to the rest of the challenge that awaited it.

“No way (the next game) is more important to those dudes than to us,” Johnson said.

LSU avoided elimination with a second win against Tennessee and again by winning a rematch with Wake Forest, setting up a winner-take-all game against Wake for a trip to the championship series.

One of the signature moments of the Tigers’ championship run was Tre’ Morgan’s diving grab and throw on a suicide squeeze bunt to keep the game scoreless in the eighth inning.

Johnson cited Morgan’s spectacular play as an uncommon execution of a comman play the team had practiced all season.

When Tommy White hit a two-run homer in the 11th inning, LSU was on its way to the best-of-three final against Florida.

Johnson called the White homer “the greatest moment of my life.”

The Tigers won Game 1 before getting embarrassed by the Gators 24-4 in Game 2.

“You all were losing your minds (after Game 2),” Johnson told the audience with a smile. “You remember that. I remember that.”

As for the team Johnson “didn’t have to say anything to them.”

“They were not ordinary people,” in their “competitive nature,” he said.

The stakes in the winner-take-all Game 3 for the national championship weren’t going to change “because they had been the same all year.”

“We played our best game when it mattered most,” Johnson said of the 18-4 win in the finale.

Johnson gave a shout-out to the supporters in the audience – and by extension those everywhere – by saying “the way the entire state showed up in Omaha was amazing.”

The coach made two trips to the CWS while at Arizona, but said the experience last season was “completely different.”

“That type of loyalty and support doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Johnson said.

He praised his colleagues on the dais and others in Louisiana for the strength of their programs as well as their players’ development.

“I really, really enjoy the Tuesday night games (which mostly feature in-state competition),” Johnson said.

This year’s schedule features mid-week games against SLU (two), Louisiana Tech, Southern, McNeese, UNO, Nicholls, Grambling and Northwestern State.

Johnson noted that the non-conference competition bolsters the Tigers’ RPI because of the quality of opposition as well as enhancing their competitiveness outside of the SEC grind.

It’s also a little more friendly competition than weekends in the heart of the season.

“The SEC is very competitive and contentious,” Johnson said. “I haven’t made a lot of friends there.”

Delgado coach Joe Scheuermann, who has won more than 1,100 games as the longest-tenured college coach in Louisiana, noted the growth of college baseball in his home state by pointing out that five programs have started during his 34-year tenure.

Loyola revived its program in 1991 after an 18-year absence, Nunez Community College became a conference rival of Delgado in 2018, Xavier began its program in 2019, Dillard started its last season and SUNO is making its debut this season.

Xavier coach Adrian Holloway led the Gold Rush to the Black College World Series in his first season, leading him to quip, “what are you going to do now?” Trennis Grant led Dillard to the Gulf Coast Athletics Conference championship in his first season.

In addition to the arrival of new programs has been the construction of new facilities.

Delgado and SLU are scheduled to open new baseball buildings on February 1 and Nunez, which has been playing at Chalmette High School, is scheduled to move into a new stadium in 2026. In recent years Louisiana Tech and Louisiana-Lafayette have renovated their baseball facilities.

UNO coach Blake Dean, who played at LSU, acknowledged that Johnson “gets most” of Louisiana’s best players, “but he can’t have them all.”

That allows Dean and the others to build and maintain programs that can compete successfully in their conferences.

Last season Nicholls State coach Mike Silva took the Colonels to the NCAA tournament in his second year and Tulane coach Jay Uhlman took the Green Wave to the tournament in his first season.

Silva said college baseball in Louisiana benefits from the friendly and mutually beneficial relationships that all the college coaches share among themselves and with the prep coaches.

“It’s not like that everywhere,” he said. “Louisiana is a special place with special people.”

The keynote speaker summed things up.

“It’s a tremendous honor to be a college baseball coach in the state of Louisiana,” Johnson said.

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