Why South Carolina baseball’s new pitching coach is a ‘superstar in the making’
Justin Parker dips off the Founders Park concourse and into the underbelly of the ballpark. Heading up a staircase and through another set of doors into South Carolina’s baseball offices, he hangs a left and takes a seat behind his office desk.
The Gamecocks’ new pitching coach has kept his office setup simple: There’s a computer, a few scattered notebooks, a calendar and a handful of other knickknacks.
The walls have yet to be adorned with posters or pictures that usually coat coaches’ offices. Such is life when moving halfway across the country to a new place and program.
“It’s been the smoothest transition (I’ve experienced),” Parker told The State. “I don’t know if it’s experience, but there just hasn’t been a ton of anxiety or stress.”
Parker was hired from Indiana in July to replace Skylar Meade, now the head coach at Troy. He takes over a staff that has its share of front-end options in Will Sanders and Julian Bosnic, but may well rely on a handful of young arms to round out the rotation.
Those closest to Parker characterize him as a “bro’s bro.” That’s not to be mistaken as soft. Parker is anything but. He’s a fiery competitor enamored with new-age philosophies that have become increasingly prevalent in baseball.
Those in Columbia are learning that firsthand.
“I think it’s really hard to find really well-rounded coaches these days,” UCF head coach and Parker’s former boss Greg Lovelady said. “There’s guys that are really good at recruiting. There’s guys that are really good at development. There’s guys that are cool dudes that kids can relate to.
“I’ve always known — especially when we got here to UCF — that (Parker) was a superstar in the making. I just think now the rest of the world is about to see it because he’s so good at all those aspects.”
A competitor to his core
Indiana head coach Jeff Mercer thinks back to 2008. After spending two years as a player at Dayton, he transferred across the city to join the team at Wright State.
Mercer, Parker and first baseman Jeremy Hamilton connected to take batting practice on one of Mercer’s first few days on the Horizon League school’s campus. Armed with a bucket of baseballs and a wood bat they found lying around, the trio headed for the field.
Parker, who played in the infield for the Raiders, ripped his first few reps in unintended directions. Mercer and Hamilton followed with their swings. Parker reset.
Swinging with the power and torque his 6-foot-1, 190-pound frame afforded, he misfired once more on his next set. Parker muttered a few choice words before innocently smacking the head of the bat on the ground. The wood shattered.
“He kinda looked at me and was like, ‘My bad, bro,’ ” Mercer recounts jokingly. “We just laughed about it.”
To be clear, Parker isn’t a hothead, or one to easily let his blood boil. Rather, he’s always been relaxed and easygoing with teammates and players. That competitive fire, though, boils right there beneath the surface of his endearing smile and inviting Midwestern drawl.
Temperatures crept into the teens and below during a 2005 midweek game between Notre Dame and Wright State. Just a freshman at the time, Parker started at shortstop. He responded, as former WSU coach Rob Cooper remembers it, with a quartet of errors in the field and four strikeouts at the plate.
Parker never sulked on that frigid day in South Bend. Wright State clung to a 4-2 lead in the ninth inning when he scooped a tricky, bouncing grounder and flung the ball across the diamond for the final out of the day. Upset secured.
“I share that (story) with every team I’ve ever coached,” said Cooper, who’s now the head coach at Penn State. “Because you want guys to understand that as long as you stay focused and stay present mentally, you will have a chance to impact the game.”
Parker has maintained that competitive side since transitioning from his three-year minor league career to coaching.
He joined pickup basketball games with players in an auxiliary gym at the Nutter Center while an assistant at Wright State. The pace was frenetic and matched that of a handful of 20-somethings racing up and down the court. Parker always kept pace.
Joining Lovelady’s staff at UCF in 2017, Parker ocassionally took part in fielding drills to challenge his players. He even rang up hitters in batting practice — when allowed — to keep them on their toes.
“He liked to carve up the hitters and give them a little bit of their own medicine every once in a while,” former UCF pitcher Jordan Scheftz told The State. “That was always fun watching him try to compete with the players.”
Caleb Sampen’s voice mellows when asked what he remembers most about Parker.
Sampen began his freshman season as Wright State’s Sunday starter on a tear, allowing no more than three hits in each of his first four outings. After an up-and-down outing early that spring, Sampen skipped a scheduled workout following one of his bullpen sessions. Parker approached him about it. He made clear if Sampen wanted to put himself in position to be drafted into the minors, he couldn’t skip out on lifts.
Sampen took the talk to heart. He finished his time at Wright State with a 14-4 record, a 2.92 ERA and .222 batting average against over his 141.2 innings pitched. The Los Angeles Dodgers selected him in the 20th round of the 2018 MLB draft.
He’s since climbed to the Double-A level in the Tampa Bay Rays organization.
“That was something that stuck with me for a while,” Sampen told The State. “He’s not afraid to do that to guys, which is good. I think some coaches have their guys and sometimes they don’t want to call them out for stuff. But (Parker) does it in a good way to where it’s like, I knew he was right.”
‘I’d take a bullet for the guy’
Parker is lauded by colleagues as a rising star in college baseball circles. If he had his pick, though, he might opt to run an NFL front office.
“If you ask him what his dream job is, he’ll probably tell you to be the general manager of the Indianapolis Colts,” Lovelady said. “He started looking at things differently than a radar gun or what the batting average was of a kid you were recruiting.”
Parker, Lovelady says, is enamored with the NFL draft and its processes. He’s intrigued by the way football players are broken down by skill set and examined in how they move.
Some of that interest arises out of Parker’s background as a high school football player in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He’s also a fantasy football junkie.
The rest? That’s his keen eye for talent and his incorporation of modern tactics in his coaching style.
“I think (Parker) was at the forefront of it where he was looking at hip mobility and ankle mobility,” Lovelady continued. “What kind of movers guys were and basing that on their athleticism and what is that going to project them as? Will they throw harder, run faster or hit the ball farther? Eleven years ago, that wasn’t something that was big in baseball. I think it was bigger in football.”
Coaching at South Carolina differs from spots like Wright State or UCF. Prospects are more easily intrigued by the fancy facilities and storied tradition in Columbia. On the Mid-American or American Athletic Conference levels, Parker and his colleagues had to do more projecting and developing.
Jason Bahr walked onto the team at UCF as a sophomore before getting cut as a junior by a previous regime. When Lovelady and Parker arrived the next year, Bahr hoped he might latch on with the new staff.
He spent the subsequent summer as a part-time lifeguard, while moonlighting as a pitcher in the Florida Collegiate Summer League — a six-team, wood bat league designed to help college players boost their draft stock.
Parker decided to evaluate Bahr himself. Watching Bahr pitch for the Altamonte Springs Boom in the FCSL, Parker liked what he saw.
If Bahr took better advantage of his four-seam fastball, Parker thought, it could be a weapon. Bahr agreed. He increasingly leaned on the pitch after being re-added to the Knights’ roster. It led to a team-high 98 strikeouts in 24 appearances, including five starts, that spring.
Bahr’s efforts made him a fifth round selection of the San Francisco Giants in the 2017 MLB draft.
“I had a really good fastball and I hadn’t really been pitching with it too much up until he opened my eyes to it,” said Bahr, who’s now pitching for the Texas Rangers’ Triple-A affiliate. “I realized that it was a really good pitch and I think that was probably the main thing that made things take off from there.”
Bahr’s tale isn’t an isolated one. Ask enough former players and you’ll find it’s the norm around Parker.
Former UCF pitcher Eric Hepple said Parker insisted he learn how to throw a cutter ahead of his senior year. Hepple reticently agreed. That pitch, he said, ended up getting him drafted.
Matt Litwicki committed to Chris Lemonis’ staff at Indiana before Lemonis took the head coaching job at Mississippi State in 2018. Litwicki concedes he was stubborn as a youngster and fought hard to avoid adapting to Parker’s teachings. He eventually ceded to those philosophies. Litwicki was one of the four Indiana pitchers selected in the 2021 MLB draft.
“When you’re a freshman and you get a new coaching staff and you think you’re top dog — and, realistically, I was not top dog — it’s a little humbling,” Litwicki told The State. “Then you get your butt whooped a little bit and then you’ve to buy into his (Parker’s) process. And when I did, it was just kind of like a mutual respect. I’d take a bullet for the guy.”
Next steps in Columbia and at South Carolina
South Carolina head coach Mark Kingston approached Parker in July when Meade landed the head coaching job at Troy. Lovelady — who played for Kingston at Miami in the late 1990s and has a long history with Parker — ran interference for the two.
Parker couldn’t turn down a job at one of the SEC’s premier programs. It didn’t make leaving Bloomington any easier.
The former Wright State star was raised in the Hoosier State. Indiana’s campus sits just a few hours south of his hometown of Fort Wayne.
Mercer and Parker are also tight as can be. They spent three years on the WSU staff together and another three at Indiana after their playing days. Mercer even asked Parker to be the best man at his wedding. (Mercer quips Parker had plenty of material to work with for his speech.)
“It was tough on both of us, I think,” Parker said. “But, at the end of the day, this was the right move.”
South Carolina opens its season this weekend against UNC-Greensboro. Early season unknowns aside, Parker feels confident his group will be ready to go after a smooth transition to his teachings.
That transition will be made even easier if the Gamecocks add a bit of hardware to occupy the empty shelves tucked into the back left corner of Parker’s new office.
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
