What Are the Immediate Steps for New LSU Baseball Coach Jay Johnson?
After a month long search, LSU has found its successor to Paul Mainieri by bringing in Arizona coach Jay Johnson. The announcement was made official on Friday but the work has already started for the new leader of the LSU baseball program.
Johnson was announced Friday with a press conference to follow on Monday, June 28.
"I am humbled and honored to be the head baseball coach at LSU and serve as the steward of the next generation of national champions," Johnson said in a statement. "LSU is a phenomenal University and athletics department, and I am very thankful to Scott Woodward and Stephanie Rempe for entrusting me to lead this storied program into its next winning chapter. I view this as the opportunity of my lifetime and will do everything in my power to have our team playing a brand of baseball that makes everyone at LSU, the Baton Rouge community, and the entire state of Louisiana incredibly proud. Geaux Tigers!"
We'll surely learn more about Johnson and the plans for the Tigers' program in the long term future. But there are some pressing needs to tend to in the immediate future as well. First and foremost Johnson will need to fill out an assistant staff, a process that should move relatively quickly.
Johnson's teams have always been pretty consistent at the plate as he recruited really consistent hitters over the years while leading the Arizona program. In four of his five seasons at Arizona, Johnson helped the Wilcats offense lead the Pac 12 in hits and runs.
However, much like Mainieri, hiring a hitting coach, pitching coach and recruiting coordinator will come first and foremost. LSU lost hitting coach Eddie Smith to Utah Valley and recruiting coordinator Nolan Cain to Texas A&M.
Some names that will certainly be thrown around are former Texas A&M coach and pitching coach Rob Childress, who was let go by the Aggies. D1 Baseball's Kendall Rogers offered an ideal assistant staff for LSU and Johnson that included either Childress or Texas' Sean Allen as pitching coach and the Longhorns Troy Tulowitzki or Southern Miss' Chad Caillet as hitting coach.
It's difficult to project, especially at this time what the staff will look like under Johnson, who is an elite recruiter himself. With all of the resources a coach could ask for in the world of college baseball, Johnson should be able to continue LSU's success on the recruiting trail.
Speaking of the recruiting trail, that will also need to be a point of emphasis for Johnson in the weeks to come. Decisions on the 2022 recruiting class are coming up with the MLB Draft and it'll be important for Johnson to get on the phone with each recruit before and after the draft to gauge the interest in signing professionally or coming to school.
That duty has fallen on Mainieri since the 2021 season ended and Cain departed for Texas A&M. The Johnson name has already started to have lingering effects on the upcoming class as longtime Arizona commit Mikey Romero flipped his decision to LSU just hours after the LSU news broke.
That's as good a sign as any to the loyalty Johnson receives from those high school prospects he recruits. Conveying that message to the current list of LSU commits will be important to bringing most of the class to campus.
LSU also has an abundance of players currently on the roster Johnson will need to reach out to in order to see what their future plans are. The high profile players like Dylan Crews, Tre Morgan, Jordan Thompson, Cade Doughty, Brody Drost Garrett Edwards and Javen Coleman are all in summer ball around the country.
But there are veteran players like Cade Beloso, Giovanni DiGiacomo and Drew Bianco, all who had roles on the 2021 team whose futures at LSU are very much up in the air. Talking with Johnson and getting a good feel for their future with the Tigers will be of the utmost importance.
Regardless of the decisions of some of the veteran players, Johnson and his new staff will need to likely hit the transfer portal hard with the likely loss of its entire starting pitching rotation. These are decisions that will need to be made in the weeks to come in the hopes of building out a roster that already has Omaha or bust expectations.