How can Mark Kingston get USC baseball back on track? Look at his last job
As South Carolina baseball enters the 2020 season, Mark Kingston is facing about as much pressure as any third-year coach in the country.
With a proud winning tradition and recent memories of success, USC baseball and its fans are accustomed to competing at high levels all the time, and last season’s 28-28 record was one of program’s worst in the past half-century.
Making that mark sting a little more is the fact that Kingston took Carolina all the way to the NCAA Super Regionals in his first season — instead of turning that surge of momentum into success in Year 2, the Gamecocks failed to meet expectations.
Now, in Year 3 of the Kingston era, the coach is at a critical moment. What gives him confidence that he can come through it lies in Tampa.
REBUILDING THE PROGRAM
When Kingston first took over as coach of South Florida in 2015, he inherited a team coming off a disappointing season but not far removed from some success — the Bulls had won 74 games combined from 2012-2013, the most in the program’s last 15 years.
And with “a little bit of a culture change (and) some development stuff,” USF got back to that success, Kingston’s former assistant Billy Mohl told The State. That first season, they went 34-26-1 and made the program’s first NCAA tournament since 2002.
And then came Year 2 in 2016. Seniors and Major League Baseball draftees were gone. In their place was a talented but inexperienced recruiting class. And throughout the season, the pitching staff was hit with injury after injury.
“I think we had seven starters that were freshmen. When you have a situation like that, you’re gonna deal with a little bit of heartache, growing pains, so that’s kinda what that year was,” said former player Kevin Merrell, who was a sophomore at the time.
“We had five pitchers out for the year in 2016, one of them who ended up being a future first-rounder,” Mohl added. “So from a depth standpoint on the mound we were banged up. So you factor those two things in between the young offense and the depleted pitching staff, it made a rough year.”
The final record was 24-33, the program’s worst finish in a decade and third worst since 1990.
“It definitely wasn’t easy. Definitely not easy because it’s just more of a grind when you’re not playing well and you’re trying to develop guys,” Merrell said. “It’s just, practices are a little bit tougher, and you just kinda go through those times that you have to get where you want to be.”
If that trajectory rings a bell, it should — arriving at South Carolina in 2018, Kingston took a senior-laden squad that struggled the year before and transformed it into a team one win shy of the College World Series. Then, when those seniors left, USC’s young offense struggled mightily while the pitching staff was depleted by injury after injury.
“It’s been very similar, actually,” Kingston acknowledged. “You come in the first year and you just try to help a returning team with a lot of seniors overachieve and do the best they can, and we had great success. The second year is kind of really the beginning of the rebuilding of the program, and we struggled.”
KINGSTON’S ABILITY TO OVERCOME ADVERSITY
Now comes Year 3. At South Florida, that’s when all the pain of the season before turned into valuable experience fueling a team on the rise. The Bulls tied a program record with 42 wins and went back to the NCAA tournament. Merrell earned All-American honors, Kingston continued his rise up the coaching ranks, and Mohl took his place when he took the South Carolina job.
“We had pitchers that were getting healthy, and we guys that had had experience, so there was definitely a lot of confidence going in, and he kinda instilled that confidence throughout the fall and the spring,” Merrell said of Kingston. ‘We knew we were definitely gonna get better from the year prior, and throughout the year you could see guys individually getting better in 2016, so that made you a little bit more confident going into ‘17, too.”
The depth and health of the pitching staff is what really made the difference, Mohl said.
“Myself and Mark will tell you, if you can’t pitch, you can’t win. When you lose front-line guys like we did, it’s hard to cover that up,” Mohl said. “You can’t just stick a Band-Aid on that. So that was our optimism in ‘17, was we had a veteran pitching staff, and the offense was young and talented. We just got on a roll early and took off from there.”
Both men believe Kingston is capable of engineering a similar turnaround at South Carolina.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that that program moving forward is going to keep moving in the right direction. There’s just some things out of your control and you can’t help it sometime,” Mohl said.
“He just kinda has that leadership about him and that, I don’t know, you kinda want to follow him,” Merrell said. “That’s kinda the ability he has, just to rally a group and get them motivated. He’s gifted in that, for sure.”
And Kingston himself expressed confidence that he can do it again — in addition to a rough 2016 at South Florida, he endured a poor 2012 at his previous job, Illinois State, only to bounce back for a conference championship the next season.
“Year 3 is when you start to see glimpses of, OK, this is where it’s going,” Kingston said. “And I anticipate the same thing this year with this team. Our third year at USF, we won 42 games, we’re going toe-to-toe with the Florida Gators in the regional, and we’re really, really good. And so I anticipate a very similar situation. How far this team goes, I don’t know, we’ll see once the games start, but it’s very similar.”
Through those tough times in his past, Kingston said he has learned to “let the process play out” and focus on recruiting and building a culture around the program. It has worked at his two previous stops. Time will tell if he can make it happen again.
South Carolina baseball Opening Day
Who: South Carolina vs. Holy Cross
When: 4 p.m., Friday, Feb. 14
Where: Founders Park
Watch: Streaming online on SEC Network Plus via WatchESPN
Listen: 107.5 FM in Columbia area
