What baseball coach Monte Lee said about being let go at South Carolina
On Thursday, two days after the South Carolina baseball season came to a merciful end, USC athletic director Jeremiah Donati cleaned house.
Interim coach Monte Lee, pitching coach Terry Rooney and assistant coach John Hendry were all relieved of their duties Thursday, The State confirmed. Gamecock247 was the first to report the news.
This should not have come as a surprise. After the parting of ways between USC and baseball coach Paul Mainieri in March, South Carolina continued to decline. Under Lee, the Gamecocks went 10-23, finishing the season with the most losses in program history (35).
Still, there were some who wondered whether Donati would at least give Lee an interview for the full-time job.
Lee, though, had been prepared. In a radio interview Thursday night with Phil Kornblut on SportsTalkSC, Lee said he met with Donati soon after being named the interim head coach. In that meeting, Lee said, Donati told him: “If I, at any point in time, feel like we’re gonna go in another direction, I’ll tell you immediately.”
“I respected that,” Lee told Kornblut. “I wasn’t expecting anything more than for him to be upfront and honest with me once the season ended.”
“I appreciate that he met with me as soon as possible and just let me know that he was gonna go in another direction. He was very professional about it.”
Lee, a Lugoff native who spent six years as a USC assistant under Ray Tanner, said he wants to assist the next head coach in any way possible, whether they need assistance in the transition or if they simply have questions about the job.
He was also asked what advice he might give the next head baseball coach at South Carolina. Don’t try and build a team through the transfer portal, he said. What it sounded like, to any Gamecock fan reading into his words: Learn from what Mainieri did … and do the opposite.
The 2026 South Carolina baseball team included 24 players from the transfer portal and just 10 returners. It didn’t work out.
“You need to set up your recruiting classes where you have plenty of high school kids coming in that can grow up together in the program,” Lee told Kornblut. “And then supplement with the portal.”
“(Then), when you have four or five guys from the portal coming in, it’s like, ‘Hey, there’s 15 of us who have been here for three years together. Welcome to the program. Let us show you how this program is run and how we do things here.’”
As for Lee’s future, he told Kornblut he’s open to being an assistant somewhere again, as long as the fit is right with the head coach — and, well, you can probably read between the lines.
Lee, 49, was previously head baseball coach at his alma mater College of Charleston from 2009-15 and at Clemson from 2016-22.
“I want to feel like I have a really good relationship with the head coach, and that we share the same philosophies and ideas and standards, and have the same vision,” Lee said in the radio interview.
“(That) he has a vision that I can get behind and help him carry out,” he added. “I think that’s very, very important.”
This story was originally published May 22, 2026 at 7:00 AM.
