Chad Holbrook makes good on promise to fix USC’s program

South Carolina’s baseball program was in serious trouble after the 2015 season, and no one knew that more than Gamecocks coach Chad Holbrook.

USC had just missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1999, and the players most responsible for the 32 wins were set to leave when Holbrook met with the media last May.

The South Carolina staff had an offseason to replace its top three hitters, fill two weekend rotation spots and put together a team that could get the Gamecocks back competing for championships.

“When you go 32-25, and I’m the one leading this program, I have to take responsibility for that,” Holbrook said last May. “There’s going to be a sense of urgency around here for sure. You can put the gas down a little bit more, and that’s what we’re going to do. Our players are going to need to understand that what we just went through is not acceptable. I’m going to try to make that as clear as I possibly can.”

USC needed to improve, and needed to do so quickly. But as Carolina fans found out this past year in football, turning around a program that appears headed in the wrong direction is a tough task in one offseason.

South Carolina searched the junior college ranks for talented players and brought in a couple of impact freshmen, but attracting talent to Columbia was never an issue for Holbrook or his staff. The challenge would be defining roles and managing a roster filled with guys from different backgrounds and different parts of the country.

During the fall and continuing into the regular season, South Carolina’s coaching staff was able to do that. Despite its leading returning hitter being Gene Cone at .257, the Gamecocks raised their team batting average from .257 in 2015 to .290 this year, and lowered their ERA from 4.20 to 3.32.

Newcomers Dom Thompson-Williams, John Jones, Jonah Bride, Braden Webb and Adam Hill combined with improved veterans Cone, Alex Destino, Marcus Mooney, Clarke Schmidt, Josh Reagan and Tyler Johnson to form a team that went from unranked in some preseason polls to the top 10 entering the SEC Tournament this week.

“South Carolina last year, this was not a team that you would consider very, very strong willed. That’s something that’s hard to get rid of,” Kendall Rogers of D1Baseball.com told The State. “When you look at Dom, Braden Webb, you throw all of those kids into the mix, it changes the dynamic. It’s impressive to see. It’s not easy to do. This team showed us a lot the last two weeks.”

The Gamecocks are No. 5 in the RPI entering their first game of the SEC Tournament, which will be Wednesday against the winner of Georgia and Ole Miss, and are in a prime spot to earn a national seed and play at home until potentially the College World Series.

South Carolina finished the regular season with 42 wins, including a 20-9 mark in the SEC, reaching the 20-win plateau in the conference for only the fifth time ever. USC rebounded from four straight SEC losses during the latter part of the year to win its final four conference games and clinch the SEC East crown.

Rogers believes the Gamecocks are close to locking up a national seed, and can do so with a couple of wins in Hoover, Ala., or if teams such as LSU, Vanderbilt and Ole Miss don’t go on a deep run in the tournament.

“The fact that they’ve been able to get over these struggles the last two weeks says a lot about Chad,” Rogers said. “To me, they are the fourth SEC team for a national seed, and those four have separated themselves by a large margin. Florida, Texas A&M and Mississippi State could go to Hoover, lose two, and it wouldn’t mean a thing.”

Holbrook vowed after last season the Gamecocks would turn the program around in 2016.

“We’re going to work tirelessly to ensure that when I’m sitting up here next year at this time, we’re getting ready to play a big NCAA Tournament game and not wrapping up our season,” he said.

Mission accomplished.

This story was originally published May 22, 2016 at 5:23 PM.