I was feeling more than a little apprehensive.

That's a strange feeling for someone who just won the 2022 College World Series and was about to bring the first men's national championship in school history back home to Ole Miss.
But what I just heard sounded crazy.

I received word that when we fly back to Oxford the next morning, they're going to have our team do the "Walk of Champions" through The Grove.

This is a tradition started by the football team that allows the players to walk through and see all the fans who tailgate before Ole Miss games every Saturday.

It was a neat idea, but it didn't make sense to me.

There were over 20,000 fans in Omaha that watched us raise the trophy in the championship series against Oklahoma.

All our die-hard fans were still there.

There isn't going to be anyone at The Grove.

How embarrassing will that be?

I've never been happier to be wrong in my life.

When we got to The Grove to make our walk, there were thousands of people cheering for us with all the enthusiasm and excitement you can imagine.

Fast-forward a couple of days later to the parade, there were thousands and thousands more. The parade ended at the stadium, and again, I had a similar sentiment.

With thousands of people lining up the streets of Oxford, no one's going to be at the stadium, right?

I was wrong, again.

There had to be close to 8,000 fans waiting for us at the stadium as the parade concluded.

At that moment, I remember thinking, how cool is this?

It's just a baseball game, but look at how many people it's impacted and brought joy to.

This is why I do this.
 

Learning from the best

My wife loves it when I tell this story.

After I graduated from LSU and finished my playing career, I kicked the tires on coaching, but I wasn't sure if it was for me given the long hours and little pay, especially at that time.

Instead, I took a job in Tampa with an investment company as a financial planner.

Let's just say that didn't last long.

I worked there for about two months and made something like $15.

Needless to say, this job wasn't a success, nor was it going to make me rich.

So, I might as well do something I love, right?

I played for the legendary Skip Bertman at LSU.

For those that don't know, he's the John Wooden and Nick Saban of college baseball. There's no one better than Skip Bertman, so I called him up and asked him for advice about getting my foot in the door of the coaching profession.

Skip said he didn't have a spot for me on his staff, but Jim Wells did at Northwestern State, which is a small DI school in Louisiana.

I knew Jim from my time at LSU when he was a graduate assistant, so I packed up my bags and began my coaching career at Northwestern State.

After a few years there, I'd later return to my alma mater at LSU and work under Skip, but I am indebted to Jim for giving me my first coaching opportunity.

Jim would later go on to coach Alabama and have a spectacular career there. In fact, he's getting inducted into the 2024 ABCA Hall of Fame this upcoming January, so my first two jobs were under two Hall of Famers and some of the greatest minds this sport has ever seen.

Any success I've had in my career starts with those two gentlemen.
 

A chance to win

After serving as the head coach at McNeese State, I was ready to elevate to the next level and see how far I could take this coaching gig.

The job opened up at Ole Miss, but I was initially pretty hesitant about it given the program's lackluster success.

And you know what they say, you usually don't get second chances in baseball. If I failed here, I probably wouldn't have another opportunity to be a head coach in the SEC again.

The athletic director at the time, John Shafer, ended up winning me over by telling me, "Mike, baseball is the best shot to win a national championship here at Ole Miss."

That really resonated with me because that was my ultimate goal as a head coach.

And so I became Ole Miss's head coach on June 7, 2000.

I had such high expectations coming in, and we did have success as a team, but we just could not get over the hump of getting to Omaha and the CWS.

We finally got there in 2014, and that set the table when we came back to Omaha for a 2022 season that'll be remembered forever.
 

Leadership and belief

When you win a national title, people sometimes forget about the journey it took to get there. I think it can often get misconstrued that the road was easy, and we just dominated all season.

That couldn't have been further from the truth for that 2022 team.

We certainly weren't a Cinderella story, but we took our lumps.

We were ranked number one in the country around mid-March, but we proceeded to lose a series in five of the next six weekends.

More so than probably any other sport, baseball has a way of humbling you in a hurry, and our boys got humbled during that portion of the season.

But I was so proud of the way they handled themselves.

We were an old team, so we relied on leadership from guys like Justin Bench, Derek Diamond, Tim Elko, Kevin Graham, and so many others who stepped up and never blinked in the face of adversity.

Those guys turned down MLB contracts to come back and try to realize a dream in winning a national title, so when we were able to do that, it's the leadership and belief that team had in one another that gave us the opportunity.
 

Much bigger than me

You spend so much of your life dreaming about raising that trophy to the sky.

In the midst of all the hours, stress, and preparation that is required to win a national title, you kind of forget that it's so much bigger than you.

Winning the CWS meant everything to my family, the university, and everyone that's been right there with me for the last 20-plus years supporting this program.

As I mentioned before, I was in awe – and I still am – of the thousands of people that came out to The Grove and the parade to celebrate with our team.

It amazes me how much joy we can bring to people from a simple little game called baseball. There isn't a better feeling in the world, and that's what's going to continue to motivate me and my team in the coming years.

We didn't have the season that we imagined in 2023, but, as I mentioned, baseball is a humbling game.

We lost a lot of talent from that championship team, and you throw in a few injuries and a couple of bad breaks, you find yourself in a tough season.

But I love what I've seen so far this fall.

We have strong leadership and plenty of new faces that are determined to get back to Omaha and experience that once-in-a-lifetime feeling of winning a championship.

So, let's do this!