Jay Johnson Named Baseball America’s 2023 College Coach Of The Year
Image credit: Jay Johnson (Photo by Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The buzz around the 2023 LSU Tigers built steadily over the course of last summer. The Tigers were a 40-win team in 2022 and were returning outfielder Dylan Crews, the SEC co-player of the year and the early favorite to be the first overall pick in the 2023 draft. No one was ever going to overlook them.
Over the course of two months, coach Jay Johnson kept adding piece after piece to the team. All-Americans Paul Skenes and Tommy White transferred in. The Tigers brought in the top-ranked transfer and traditional recruiting classes. Draft-eligible players like Cade Beloso and Ty Floyd decided to return for another season in Baton Rouge. Johnson hired Wes Johnson, then the pitching coach for the Twins, and Josh Jordan, the 2018 Assistant Coach of the Year, to replace Dan Fitzgerald (Kansas) and Jason Kelly (Washington), who had both been hired away to be head coaches.
When the dust settled at the beginning of August and the players began returning to campus, the hype began to explode. LSU was the clear choice as the No. 1 team in the preseason. At the team’s preseason banquet, Alex Bregman introduced Johnson and charged him with winning the 2023 national championship. This was what Johnson’s success as a recruiter and the built-in lofty standards of one of the sport’s biggest brands had wrought.
Having built the monster, Johnson now had to manage it through a challenging five-month season. Many wondered how he could keep everyone happy when there were still just 27 outs a game and nine spots in the batting order to go around. Others questioned how the Tigers would handle the losses that are inevitable in a baseball season, losses that might test the team’s bonds and ratchet up the noise in Baton Rouge and beyond.
In the end, the 2023 season was largely drama free for LSU. The Tigers ranked No. 1 in the first 12 iterations of the Top 25, the longest such streak to start a season in a decade. They lost just two series and had just one losing week—the SEC Tournament. Players were moved in and out of the lineup and the rotation without public complaint. While many questions were raised outside the locker room about the quality and depth of the team’s pitching staff, the Tigers stuck together and in Omaha proved just how good they were when they held opponents to six total runs in four must-win games.
As well as Johnson recruited and organized the Tigers’ player development for the 2023 season, he also deftly managed the team’s chemistry and makeup. With LSU executing in all phases, it went on to win the national championship, the program’s seventh and first since 2009, in Johnson’s second season as head coach.
For those reasons and more, Johnson is the 2023 Baseball America Coach of the Year. He is the third LSU coach to win the award, joining Skip Bertman (1986 and 1996) and Paul Mainieri (2009). LSU is the first program to have three different men win the award, which has been awarded since 1981.
Johnson, 46, has long been known as an elite recruiter, dating back to his days as an assistant coach at San Diego. His ability to build a team as talented as the 2023 Tigers was just the latest example of that prowess.
Johnson’s skill as a motivator and team builder has typically flown more under the radar, but it was evident throughout this season. Managing a team that had 13 players drafted and the top-ranked recruiting class required a deft touch. Johnson laid the foundation for getting the Tigers to buy in early.
He said that started with getting strong leadership from players like Crews and Skenes, which helped the whole team buy into the selfless attitude.
“The first phase was player leadership,” Johnson said. “Foundationally, we always place the needs of the team above our own. It was more than a saying; I felt like team lived that out. The other thing that I think we tried to do was when we set goals, we talked about being selfless.”
Johnson also tapped into LSU’s history, showing the team examples of times when players had to wait before getting their own star turns. Warren Morris, for instance, redshirted in 1993 before developing into an All-American. In 2009, Austin Nola and Mikie Mahtook weren’t starters at the beginning of the 2009 season but played their way into the lineup and helped LSU win the national championship.
The 2023 team has its own versions of those stories that future Tigers will undoubtedly hear, such as Gavin Guidry starting the year expecting to play infield, only to end up on the mound to get the final out of the CWS or the way catchers Alex Milazzo and Hayden Travinski traded off games behind the plate down the stretch.
“For us to win a championship we had to do the same kind of things (as Morris or the 2009 team),” Johnson said. “The concept of team was greater than self throughout the entire year. It happened, that’s who we were.
“They emulated team above self and placed the team above their own selves all year.”
Johnson also worked to get the team to gel in their own way. The Tigers were a loose bunch all season, often showing a lighter side and a genuine enjoyment of playing with each other. Skenes, who was named Player of the Year, warmed up on the days that he pitched wearing a t-shirt with one of his teammate’s picture on the front. White in Omaha gifted a Buzz Lightyear jersey to Josh Pearson, who some Tigers thought bore a resemblance to the Toy Story character, and he wore it to practice.
Johnson said establishing that kind of bond is critical to a team’s success.
“I really want players to be themselves, but to become a team,” he said. “For them to develop as a team, they have to be together. So, part of that they have to take ownership in. So, if you let them be themselves, obviously within reason, with class and character and all those types of things, I’ve always just found the buy-in goes up tremendously.”
It worked with the Tigers. They felt the support from Johnson and the coaching staff throughout the season.
“He’s behind us 100% every day,” White said. “He’s an awesome coach. I couldn’t ask for a better one.”
While Johnson is relatively young—he was the third-youngest coach in the SEC in 2023—he’s been building to this point for nearly his whole life. He grew up in Oroville, Calif., a small town in Northern California, where his father, Jerry, was a high school teacher and coached track and football. In the 1980s, when Jay was growing up, the Oroville track team went undefeated in dual meets for seven straight years.
While Johnson dreamed of being like the speedy running backs his father coached in football, he eventually found his athletic home on the diamond. He played at Shasta (Calif.) JC before transferring to Point Loma Nazarene, then an NAIA school.
When his playing career ended, he moved straight into coaching. Scott Sarver, who took over the Point Loma program before Johnson’s senior season, offered Johnson his first job as a coach and he stayed at his alma mater after graduating.
“Becoming a coach was really the only option,” Johnson said. “I’m addicted to winning. I’m addicted to developing programs and helping players achieve their goals. It was just the route that it was going to be.”
Sarver gave Johnson a lot of leeway, especially for a coach who had just finished college. He let Johnson jump right into numerous aspects of running a program, setting him on the fast track.
“He gave me a chance right away, making me the recruiting coordinator, running the offense, planning practice,” Johnson said. “I had amazing autonomy to learn and make mistakes.”
Johnson was an assistant coach for four seasons before he was promoted to head coach in 2005. He spent one year in the role, going 37-16, before joining Rich Hill’s staff at San Diego. Johnson says getting to work with Hill was his biggest break and he spent eight years on staff at USD. The Toreros made the NCAA Tournament five times in those eight seasons and Johnson recruited players like Kris Bryant and Connor Joe.
From USD, Johnson was hired as the head coach of Nevada. After two seasons, including a Mountain West Conference title in 2015, he was hired away by Arizona. He took the Wildcats to the College World Series finals in his first season, losing the championship series in three games to Coastal Carolina.
Johnson spent six years at Arizona and took the Wildcats back to Omaha in 2021. After that season, with Mainieri retiring, LSU was looking for a new coach. That search ultimately led athletic director Scott Woodward to Johnson.
In Johnson’s first season, LSU went 40-22 and flipped its SEC record from 13-17 to 17-13. But the Tigers lost in the final game of the Hattiesburg Regional to Southern Mississippi. In the wake of that loss, Johnson went to work on the 2023 Tigers, calling Skenes, who had just entered the transfer portal from Air Force. It was just the beginning of a whirlwind year that would conclude with the Tigers dogpiling in Omaha.
Looking back on it all, Johnson said what he’ll remember the most from the 2023 Tigers is not their talent, though they became the first team ever to produce the first and second picks of the MLB draft when Skenes and Crews were selected back-to-back by the Pirates and Nationals, or any specific win. Instead, he said what stands out the most to him is the team’s consistency. From the time they first gathered as a team last August until they hoisted the trophy at the end of June, the Tigers built a team that wouldn’t be denied, overcoming every obstacle thrown in their path.
“The consistency of the team being who they needed to be, when they needed to be,” Johnson said. “It was phenomenal. It was so much more than talent. We lost a lot of talent. We had four major pitching injuries. We shifted the lineup throughout the season, and it didn’t seem to matter. The self-discipline to play near our potential often throughout the year, keep our head in the right place and our heart in the right place all the time.”
Johnson’s ability to engineer that consistency, both through recruiting and development is a big part of why he’s been successful throughout his career and especially so in 2023. And it’s why the Tigers are feeling good about their future with him at the program’s helm.
“This program is so lucky to have coach Jay Johnson,” Beloso said. “He’s not stopping, I promise that.”
