How LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson went from California kid to national champion

BATON ROUGE — Jay Johnson remembers where he was when Warren Morris hit the most important home run in LSU baseball history.

June 8, 1996.

Johnson was a 19-year-old kid from Oroville, California, watching the College World Series final from an apartment when the Tigers' second baseman stepped up to the plate.

"I was getting ready to play a summer baseball game," Johnson said. "I had a game at 6-o'clock that night."

There were two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning when Morris dug into the batter's box. LSU trailed by a run following Alex Cora's RBI single in the top of the inning gave Miami the 8-7 lead.

But Morris didn't waste anytime putting the Tigers back on top. He swung at Miami closer Robbie Anderson's first pitch, driving the ball over the right field wall to help LSU secure its third national title at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha.

"When you'd watch Omaha, it was always something that seemed like a realistic goal for me," Johnson said. "And (LSU) was the force. You know, they were the standard at that time."

Twenty-seven years later, Johnson has lifted LSU back to that standard by guiding the Tigers to a 2023 national championship.

LSU captured the title by downing Florida 18-4 in Game 3 of the College World Series on Monday inside Charles Schwab Field in Omaha.

The steward of the ship was Johnson, who became the first college baseball coach to guide his program to a national championship in two seasons or fewer.

So how did a California kid who could only dream of Omaha get to eventually guide one of the most storied programs in college baseball back to prominence?

Two words: Hard work.

"You don't have success without hard work, it just doesn't happen. Not at this level," LSU third base coach and recruiting coordinator Josh Jordan said. "Everybody works hard but he just outworks every single body every single day."

Johnson's roots

While growing up in Oroville — a small Northern California town that's 2,209 miles away from Baton Rouge — Johnson believed that the odds of him playing in the major leagues some day were just as realistic as him going to the moon.

But coaching — in particular, coaching in college baseball — never seemed like a far-fetched goal in his mind. His father, Jerry, was a coach already.

"(My Dad's) the winningest track coach in California history. He didn't lose for like 10 years," Johnson said. "And he was a great football coach, offensive coordinator. My heroes were his running backs, and that's all I wanted to be."

Johnson took that inspiration and ran with it, beginning his baseball coaching career as an assistant at his alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, from 2002-04 before becoming the head coach in 2005 at 27 years old.

From there, he worked his way up to becoming the associate head coach at San Diego from 2006-13, recruiting and coaching future MLB All-Star Kris Bryant. San Diego was where Johnson's work ethic as a recruiter began to shine, as he helped the Toreros sign the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation in 2008 and the No. 2 class in 2010.

Johnson then became a head coach again at Nevada for two seasons, 2014 and 2015, before taking the head job at Arizona in 2016 and guiding the Wildcats to the College World Series final in Year 1.

Arizona squared off against Coastal Carolina in the final, winning the first contest, 3-0, before the Chanticleers evened the series in Game 2 with a 5-4 triumph. Trailing by a run with two outs in the ninth inning in Game 3, the Wildcats had two runners in scoring position — but catcher Ryan Haug struck out to end the Wildcats' national title hopes.

The press conference after the game was one of the darkest moments of Johnson's life.

"I sat next to Bill (Cousins) seven years ago today with leaving the tying run on third base in this game and the winning run on second base," Johnson said. "And I think about it every single day."

LSU'S CHAMPIONSHIP ROSTER: How LSU baseball put together a national championship-caliber roster, one flight at a time

NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP CELEBRATION: LSU baseball: Tigers fans bid one last goodbye to Dylan Crews at championship celebration

2024 ROSTER: Who does LSU baseball have returning from College World Series championship team for 2024?

Getting to LSU and building a champion

Johnson was hired as LSU's head coach on June 25, 2021, exactly two years and one day before winning his first national championship for the Tigers. But the journey Johnson went on in getting to that title wasn't always easy.

He knew that winning in his first season would be difficult, especially given the pitching staff he inherited following LSU's eighth place finish in the SEC in 2021. His first season wasn't a disaster — the Tigers finished fourth in the SEC and nearly hosted a regional — but they still failed to make a super regional.

"I think (Landon) Marceaux and Jaden Hill were moving on in the draft. We didn't have a rotation," Johnson said. "Thank God Ma'Khail Hilliard came back to school and flipped 70-mile-an-hour curveballs in there, and we were able to win enough games to have a 40-win season."

To fix the problem, Johnson did the one thing he certainly knew how to do: work.

He convinced Thatcher Hurd, Tommy White and Paul Skenes to join the Tigers from the transfer portal, secured the No. 1 high school recruiting class in the nation and persuaded Minnesota Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson to spurn the big league club midseason in order to come to Baton Rouge.

"He's an obsessive recruiter," Johnson's predecessor, former LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri, said. "I mean, he's going to go out and recruit the best players that he can."

That hard work — combined with the development of returning stars Dylan Crews, Tre Morgan and Ty Floyd, among others, that Johnson helped shepherd — made LSU the No. 1 team in the nation heading into the 2023 season.

But despite those expectations, a national championship in 2023 didn't always feel like guarantee for the Tigers. LSU went just 7-7 in its last 14 games entering the NCAA Tournament and needed to win three games in three days in Omaha to even make the College World Series final.

However, led by Johnson, LSU still got the job done. And the Northern California kid accomplished his lifelong goal.

"I'm 12 years old, I had a LSU baseball hat on in Northern California and watch(ed) the purple jerseys run around Omaha all the time," Johnson said.

Koki Riley covers LSU sports for The Daily Advertiser. Email him at kriley@theadvertiser.com and follow him on Twitter at @KokiRiley

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: Jay Johnson: LSU baseball coach's journey to national championship