Southern Miss Baseball building in the historic 2022 season

Last season, Southern Miss baseball ranked 13th^th across the country in home attendance on more than 300 Division I programs.

This tends to happen when you keep raising the bar and breaking records and the Golden Eagles say they won’t stop until they finally return to Omaha.

“It’s one of those things, like, everybody talks about the adrenaline rush, like, it was like one of those highs that everybody chases.”

Right fielder Carson Paetow said, “Oh, I remember very vividly. I’ve had the Hulk smashed in the face by Charlie Fischer and missed all the good pictures.

A bloody nose and a little spray-n-wash on Southern Miss’s white threads is simply the cost of doing business after USM’s 8-7 win over LSU in Hattiesburg’s winner-take-all championship game Regional, the first ever regional title program at Pete Taylor Park. Third baseman Danny Lynch said, “We now feel like we are in that top tier of college baseball teams. It was a big step for us last year to get over that hump. We’ve been to a bunch of regionals in a row and finally won one. Kind of a good confidence boost coming this year, but it’s also, as you said, we didn’t play as well as we would have liked next weekend.

The Golden Eagles then hosted their first-ever Super Regional against home rival Ole Miss, who certainly made the most of his second chance as one of the bottom four, ending the summer as the last team standing in Omaha having topped the black and gold score 15-0 in a super sweep. “A little bit of both validations and not necessarily like, oh we got beaten by the national championship team. It wasn’t what we thought. We were like, we were this close to winning it.

“It was just a bad weekend of baseball that we played and, obviously, they played great. They were the best team in the country at that point in the year. They were playing great baseball.

Pitcher Tanner Hall said, “We use that as total motivation because I’m pretty sure our first lift this fall, Coach Mak told us the last time the city of Hattiesburg saw us play, we didn’t score. points. And that’s something we don’t want to just give up and just let it happen, so we have a lot more to prove.

As Conference USA Pitcher of the Year, Ferris Trophy winner and Consensus All-American Tanner Hall leads the way at USM in 2022 and presumably again in 2023 as a returning ace on a staff that was second in the country in ERA , WHIP , and the strike/walk ratio.

Still, USM finished in the middle of the pack at C-USA in most hit categories, an area Coach Scott Berry addressed in the offseason by adding 18 newcomers, many of whom could be impact bats for go along with 19 returning veterans. Catcher Blake Johnson said: “It seems to me that every year he gets better at hitting, and I still hit ninth, so I guess that’s quite a problem to have.”

Head coach Scott Berry said, “There’s a good balance between the returnees and the new kids, whether it’s traditional kids who just finished high school or transferring to college or even a couple of portal guys they transfer graduates, so I like the mix that we have. I certainly like what we give back.”

Perhaps the biggest change for Southern Miss in 2023, adjusting to the new conference schedule Sun Belt topped the already demanding non-conference slate, with a three-game home series against Illinois in late February and four SEC games, two against defending champion Ole Miss, one against 2021 champion Mississippi State, and one against Alabama. “I’m trying to program that good opponent to help build that RPI. So certainly, I think this is going to be a program that if we do our part and put in the wins as we have to, I think this program speaks for itself and will take care of itself.

Heading into the new year, Coach Berry is now all alone at the top of the all-time USM list for wins, having passed both Corky Palmer and Hill Denson, last season. At one point, the Golden Eagles even snatched 15-game hitting streak, leapfrogging higher as number three in the country, both programs tops.

Of course, USM’s first Super Regional appearance since its 2009 College World Series run, which put Southern Miss on a crash course to make even more history, starting in less than a month. “The vision Hill Denson saw in 1986, everyone laughed. What we’re seeing today is what Hill saw in 1986, and I can’t stress that enough.

“Not just for ourselves, but as a program in general, we want to show that we can go to Omaha and we will be able to compete with those guys there and we can compete with them anytime in the season and we would love to see them at the end of the season as well. send them home because that’s what we do.