BATON ROUGE, La. – Former LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri is among six individuals that will be honored on April 28 as “Louisiana Legends” by Friends of Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

For more than thirty years, Friends of Louisiana Public Broadcasting have honored Louisiana’s best and brightest with the Louisiana Legends Awards Gala and Auction. The 2022 honorees have distinguished themselves in fields as diverse as philanthropy, the sciences, sports, environmental conservation and the humanities.

The 2022 honorees join a prestigious list of 149 former Louisiana Legends that includes Academy and Grammy Award winners, star athletes, Pulitzer Prize winners and esteemed dignitaries, including the current United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

Mainieri, who retired as the Tigers’ coach at the end of the 2021 season, completed his 39-season career with a 1,505-777-8 record, including a 641-285-3 mark in 15 seasons at LSU.

LSU won a remarkable 31 team championships during Mainieri’s tenure, including the 2009 national championship, nine NCAA Regional championships, five NCAA Super Regional championships, four SEC regular-season titles, six SEC Tournament titles and six SEC Western Division crowns.

Mainieri completed his career No. 7 among NCAA Baseball Division I coaches in wins, and he is one of only five coaches in NCAA Division I Baseball history to earn 1,500 victories and a national championship. He was inducted in 2014 into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

Along with Mainieri, the 2022 Class of Louisiana Legends includes:

  • Arthur Favre – CEO and Founder of Performance Contractors, philanthropist, stalwart supporter of American Military Veterans
  • Saundra McGuire – Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success and retired Assistant Vice Chancellor and Professor of Chemistry at LSU; recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring
  • Stephen McGuire – James and Ruth Smith Endowed Emeritus Professor of Physics at Southern University and A&M, Southern University Principal Investigator to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration; awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2017
  • Valsin Marmillion – President and CEO Marmillion & Company, Managing Director of the America’s Wetlands Foundation
  • Thomas Whitehead – Professor Emeritus at Northwestern State University, Expert and Preservationist of the Clementine Hunter Collection, and biographer