'Not a Cinderella story': Coastal Carolina's rise as a college baseball power
Blake Barton and Colby Thorndyke each drive in a run in the seventh inning to give Coastal Carolina a 10-3 lead over Louisville. (0:29)
OMAHA, Neb. -- On April 22, the College of Charleston baseball team beat Coastal Carolina, and winning coach Chad Holbrook walked across the field to his car and glanced over at the third-base dugout. Coastal Carolina's players were on the bus, and the coaches were having a meeting. Holbrook considers those coaches friends -- they're separated by less than a two-hour drive and essentially share a beach -- and when he looked in, he thought they seemed down.
So Holbrook stopped.
"I told them, 'Why are y'all so mad?'" he said. "'You've got one of the best teams in the country. You're going to host a regional and probably be a national seed, and you're probably not going to lose the rest of the year.'"
Holbrook firmly believed the first three assertions. But not losing again? That probably was hyperbole.
Twenty-six games later, Coastal Carolina hasn't lost, and Holbrook seems prescient.
The Chanticleers, riding a 26-game winning streak, face LSU on Saturday in the Men's College World Series best-of-three championship round.
Asked Thursday about that April exchange, Coastal Carolina coach Kevin Schnall smiled and recalled that day, repeating the quotes almost verbatim. He disputed just one detail -- that he and his coaches were glum.
"We were disappointed that we didn't play well," Schnall said. "But we were more regrouping and making sure we're on the same page for the weekend ahead."
Schnall, 48, is precise. He is a first-year coach who spent half of his life as an assistant and leaves nothing to chance. He was an All-American for the Chanticleers in the 1990s, replaced his mentor Gary Gilmore as coach and reached these current heights by calculating everything, including the messaging.
On Sunday, he went viral in college baseball circles after his team beat Oregon State and Schnall made a point to correct the media members who have been pronouncing the school's nickname wrong.
"Everybody say it with me," he said, his voice rising. "SHON-tuh-cleers!"
The weekend before, he seemed offended by any underdog label after his 13th-seeded team swept No. 4 Auburn in super regionals. He said "this is not a Cinderella story," while reciting the program's rich and successful postseason history, which includes 21 NCAA tournaments in the past 25 seasons and a national championship in 2016.
The weekend before that, he wasn't afraid to call Florida's Kevin O'Sullivan a bully after an expletive-filled rant to site administrators in the Conway Regional.
And for all that, he has garnered the respect of Chanticleers past and present.
"I would go and run through a wall for that guy right now, and I'm not even on the team," said G.K. Young, an All-American from the 2016 title team.
As for those current players, catcher Caden Bodine, the team's leading hitter and a finalist for the Buster Posey Award given annually to Division I's top backstop, said the Chants have gotten used to Schnall's blue-collar mentality.
"He's very intense, but we like him a lot, and we really all feed off of that," Bodine said.
Young, in fact, sees a lot of 2016 Coastal Carolina in the current team.
"Relentless," he said. "Doesn't back down, doesn't give up and is not scared of anybody."
But on Thursday, Schnall played off all those made-for-social-media headlines and deflected any attention on himself to his team. As Schnall stood outside a downtown Omaha indoor practice facility while Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" thumped in the background and his players moved about with a regimented purpose, he dismissed the notion that his players had anything to prove, or that they were motivated by any slights.
"I feel like we did as much as we could to earn the eighth seed," he said. "The committee didn't see it that way. Two of the words we live by are 'own it.' We own the 13th seed, and our guys have played extremely well."
Holbrook's team beat Coastal Carolina twice this season, accounting for nearly 20% of the Chanticleers' losses. Things just felt right for them both of those days, he said. That's baseball.
Holbrook was compelled to stop that day in April, because he knew the Chanticleers were a special team and he figured the coaches needed to hear that -- even if Schnall disputes he was upset following that loss.
"We're all looking for that edge to lead our team," Holbrook said. "That button to push. And obviously you can tell their players have mad respect for their leader. He's doing a masterful job of not only leading them, but motivating them and having their back in a public setting. And players love that.
"He's fired up, man. And he's got his boys playing fired up."
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