How Monte Lee ‘was a star’ in helping Kevin Schnall shape plan for USC roster rebuild
Kevin Schnall will have lots of work on his hands in the first few weeks of his tenure as South Carolina’s new head baseball coach.
Schnall inherits a skeleton of a roster that went 22-35 this past season. So far, 23 Gamecocks from the 2026 roster have hit the transfer portal since it opened on June 1. Of those 23, a handful have already committed to new programs.
The ultimate goal for Schnall is to get South Carolina back to Omaha for the first time since winning a national title in 2012. But in the immediate future, he’s aiming to put together a roster.
“[Goal] 1A is to retain and acquire elite players,” Schnall said Friday night as he was officially introduced as USC’s new coach. “And we’re moving in the right direction there.”
Schnall will have to find the balance between recruiting new faces while also re-recruiting, in a way, those Gamecocks who are still on the roster or are in the transfer portal.
“As a staff, we’re assessing and evaluating every single position,” Schnall said. “We’ve been in great contact with the players, and ultimately we want to make sure that people want to be here. It’s very important that they want to be at the University of South Carolina, they want to be part of the change, they want to be part of this program moving forward.”
USC Athletic Director Jeremiah Donati said one thing that impressed him during Schnall’s interview was a binder he brought that had “next-level data analytics” on all of South Carolina’s players.
Schnall — who said he plans to use analytics at a “very high level” — said he received help from South Carolina’s outgoing coaching staff to get intel on the remaining players on the roster he’s inheriting.
“We dove into them analytically,” Schnall said. “... Monte Lee was a star, and he was extremely professional in handling this. Monte Lee gave us a lot of intel. Stuart Lake is another guy that we leaned on heavily, so we were able to collect a lot of information on these guys very quickly. And then ultimately, now it’s our job to assemble the best roster to put us in the best position to be extremely successful.”
It hasn’t even been a week since Schnall was officially named USC’s head coach, but that hasn’t stopped him from finding success on the recruiting trail.
As of Saturday morning, South Carolina has already picked up commitments from nine players in the transfer portal. Of those, seven are coming straight from Schnall’s former school in Coastal Carolina.
Those Chanticleers set to be Gamecocks are pitchers Hayden Johnson (5-0, 2.82 ERA in 2025), Colby Richardson (4-1, 5.10 ERA), Daniel Parker (3-0, 4.76 ERA), and Luke Jones (4-2, 4.44 ERA). Infielders Jackson Winer (.241 average) and Walker Mitchell (.313) will also be making the move to Columbia.
Whatever combination of players Schnall puts together on his roster, he’s hoping it’ll lead to a “dynamic” offense. Schnall said he hopes to have a balance of athletic right- and left-handed hitters.
“The name of the game is the score runs,” Schnall said. “We want to have guys that are obsessed with getting to first base. Also, we want to be able to do the inside game, we want to be able to steal bases, we want to be able to have guys that can run first to third, we want to have guys that can score from first on doubles, and we want to have guys that can slug.
“We want to hit the ball out of the ballpark. So our goal is to put together and assemble an offense that is dynamic and can score runs in multiple ways.”
This story was originally published June 15, 2026 at 7:00 AM.
