BATON ROUGE — CollegeBaseballInsider.com, in its seventh year of covering college baseball on a national level, announced Thursday that LSU coach Paul Mainieri and Stanford coach Mark Marquess share National Coach of the Year honors.
The duo was selected from a group of five finalists, which included North Carolina coach Mike Fox, Nebraska coach Mike Anderson and Georgia coach David Perno.
LSU had missed the NCAA postseason the past two seasons but made huge strides in Mainieri’s second season at the helm of the program. The Tigers (48-17-1) enter the College World Series with 19 more wins than they compiled last season after they were picked to finish fifth in the SEC Western Division in the 2008 league coaches’ poll.
With four weeks remaining in the regular season, LSU was 23-16-1 overall and in 11th place in the overall league standings with a 6-11-1 SEC record. However, the Tigers posted a conference-record 23-game win streak that saw LSU claim the SEC Western Division title, the SEC Tournament championship and the NCAA Baton Rouge Regional championship.
LSU’s 23-game surge ended with a loss to UC Irvine in Game 1 of the NCAA Baton Rouge Super Regional, but the Tigers won the next two games over the Anteaters to advance to the College World Series.
The Tigers are making their 14th CWS appearance, and their first since 2004. Mainieri has guided two different teams to Omaha, as he also led his 2002 Notre Dame squad to the CWS.
Stanford missed NCAA tournament play in 2007 and was picked to finish sixth in the loaded Pac-10 by Marquess’ coaching peers in the preseason. Stanford (39-22) won 11 more games than last year and is making its 16th College World Series appearance this week.