To say that Jay Johnson has made an instant impact at the programs he’s led would be a tremendous understatement. In 2014, he led the University of Nevada to their first-ever conference title in his second season in Reno. Two years later, Johnson took Arizona to the College World Series finals in his first season in Tucson. And his second season at LSU resulted in the seventh national title in program history.
The Tigers were truly dominant in 2023. They maintained consensus No. 1 rankings for the first 12 weeks of the season, scored the most runs in the country (634), struck out a school-record 798, boasted three First-Team All-Americans and set an SEC record with 13 players selected in the MLB Draft.
Johnson, who was 27 when he got his first head job at his alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene, is 200 wins over .500 in his 11 seasons as a head coach. He spent 2006-13 as the associate head coach at the University of San Diego, where he recruited and coached Kris Bryant.
Johnson’s USD offenses led the league six times in eight seasons. A native of Oroville, California, Johnson married his wife, Maureen, a former University of Arizona soccer player, in 2016.
Inside Pitch: You had the opportunity to be an assistant in between head coaching jobs. What did you learn?
Jay Johnson: Having the opportunity to go with Rich Hill at the University of San Diego for eight years was probably the most important career decision that I’ve made. He’s one of the best coaches in the country and he really pushed me to develop players better and recruit more efficiently, which became the blueprint of how I would want to run my own program someday.
I learned that your program is only as good as the players you have, so you have to start with recruiting, especially if you’re an assistant. Right behind that is development, which is number one from a head coach perspective. Our players always come first for me. If I’m on the phone in the office and a player walks in, that phone call will be wrapped up very quickly. My goal is to keep our players at the forefront of everything we’re doing. Whatever is going to positively affect them jumps to the top of the to-do list for me.
IP: You’re a West Coast guy, California-born, made a few coaching stops out that way. Was there any culture shock when you got to Baton Rouge?
JJ: I think I walked into this with my eyes wide open. This is the pinnacle of college baseball. I would say the talent and depth of the players and the teams in the SEC has lived up to the billing. There’s just no letup in terms of the competition and the intensity level of what you have to do on a daily basis to compete at the top of our league, which is the top of college baseball.
IP: No seafood shoutouts? Gumbo or jambalaya?
JJ: I’m not a very tall guy, so I have to be careful with what I eat because there are not a lot of places to put it! But you’re right; the food, the culture, the people, all of that has been amazing. I feel like I fit right in actually. I grew up in a small town in northern California (Oroville), which parallels Louisiana in a lot of ways.
IP: What are your strengths and weaknesses as a coach?
JJ: I would think one of my strengths—and maybe one of my weaknesses—is that I’ve always tried to keep things simple and haven’t had a lot of things in my life pull me away from the job. Some good advice that I’ve gotten along the way is “keep the main thing the main thing.” I’ve always kind of kept this at the top of my list—that’s been a good roadmap for me. I really respect coaches that have multiple skill sets who can do a lot of things really well, but the tunnel vision approach has always been best for me.
IP: How would you describe your coaching journey?
JJ: I took my first coaching job for like $2,500 a year. I found a way to make it work when I was an assistant at Point Loma Nazarene, where I played. I was doing lessons all the time, working at a baseball academy, whatever I could do so I could afford to put all my focus into coaching and recruiting.
Probably one of the best things I did was to have patience. I felt like when I took the job at the University of Nevada, I was ready. I’d been a head coach for one year at Point Loma, but I’d been an assistant for four there, and I was the associate head coach at San Diego for eight. I worked hard, I always tried to treat where I was like it was the big time, so now that I’m at LSU, I don’t view my job any differently than I did when I was the head coach at Point Loma in 2005, in terms of the focus level, the energy level, and the importance level that I put on it.
IP: Do you feel like you’ve developed a certain portal strategy? Or will you continue to lean into this thing hard?
JJ: It became evident really quick how important the portal was in my first year here. I’m really proud of what we accomplished in 2022, but there’s no way we would’ve finished in the top four in the SEC without Jacob Berry, Riley Cooper, Tyler McManus, and Eric Reyzelman. There’s no way that would’ve happened without those guys.
Our attraction is in the high-end talent, like Jacob Berry, who was the first hitter taken in the draft in 2022, Paul Skenes, who was obviously the number one pick in the draft in ’23, Tommy White is the best hitter in the country, Thatcher Hurd is an impact arm on the mound.
My preference is to build our program with the players that we bring in out of high school, but the reality is that nobody can abandon the portal, because everyone else is going to lean into it, and therefore so are we. But we are very selective with who we’re going after.
IP: What are your expectations?
JJ: How many players, coaches, programs start off the year wanting to be in Omaha and win a national championship? That’s certainly the case for us, but I’ve learned that you can’t win a national championship in October or November. All you can do is make the decision to be completely immersed in whatever you’re doing. That puts you in position to play to your capability.
Baseball is volatile. It’s not the team with the best players all the time. It’s the team that plays the best that day. Look at the 2023 NLCS; it’d be a hard argument that the Diamondbacks were a more talented team than the Phillies, but they played better, and so they won. For us, it’s always coming back to the play, to what’s directly in front of us. It’s about having the self-discipline to be where your feet are, be in the present moment, then focus on your training and development. So then when you’re in that position, you’re ready to execute.
IP: Any recruiting tips for young coaches?
JJ: I would say this to the young coach out there, if you want to build your career in DI baseball, recruiting is the most important skill to have. I really believe head coaches are making assistant coach hires on the basis that they are going to help acquire more talented players than they have currently.
I don’t necessarily love that it’s that way, but it’s the reality of the situation. Becoming a good evaluator and a good recruiter is crucial if you want to move up the ladder in this business.
Devoting the time and attention to it is really necessary if you want to build a career as a DI baseball coach. And sometimes it’s hard to get our head around that because we all love the teaching, the coaching, the development side of it. I just think it’s one of those realities.
IP: You’ve coached more than two dozen players who have made it to the big leagues, a number that’s growing fast. Give me one that was under the radar…
JJ: Great timing for this question. Paul Sewald, the closer for the Diamonbacks, came to San Diego as a non-scholarship player. He didn’t really pitch that much for us for two years, had a very good junior year in 2012 and a great senior year. Just a great story of perseverance.
He really performed well in the minors, and he had to. It took him a while to get to the big leagues—he was substitute teaching and doing all sorts of stuff in the off-seasons—and now he’s one of the best closers in baseball. It’s a great story, one that our players can relate with, and there are plenty of others: Connor Joe, Kevin Ginkel, Bobby Dalbec. My message is that it’s all totally possible if you sell out to this thing, but you do have to sell out, because it’s incredibly competitive. I always want to be a program that’s a training ground for future major league players, and that’s a big priority for me.
IP: If you had a blank whiteboard and you had to rebuild everything from day one, what are the first few things going up there?
JJ: I think program foundation starts with fundamentals, which we define as doing common things in an uncommon way, which really comes down to competitiveness. That’s something I took from Terry Francona, just valuing what it takes to win and make really good decisions both on and off the field.
The game comes down to strikes and the strike zone. Andy McKay from the Seattle Mariners made a great comparison—the strike zone in baseball is like the line of scrimmage in football—either the pitcher is controlling it or the hitters are. So now you’re down to the pitcher’s ability to throw strikes, and the hitter’s ability to manage the strike zone.
Defensively, outs need to be outs. A lot of coaches talk about dominating the routine play, which is certainly part of it. We want to be especially good when outs are given to us, pop-ups, rundowns, sac bunts, first and third defense...you can’t outrun the baseball if you just play catch.
Offensively, we try to be really good at getting the leadoff man on base, and we do all we can to get three really good at bats, “quality at bats” in a row. Then it comes down to execution when you have men in scoring position, or what we call “red zone offense.”
We share that “blueprint for winning” with our coaches and players, and then all of the training, practice and development funnel through those fundamentals.
IP: Let’s say you have a day off—no recruiting, no practice, no LSU baseball at all—what are you doing?
JJ: A whole lot of relaxing, to be honest with you, because I go pretty hard at this thing. So I try to keep the very little downtime as just that, downtime. I don’t have any hobbies, other than maybe watching college football. So if one of those days falls there, that’s where you’ll find me.
IP: You’ve mentioned teams from the past couple years in this interview, and certainly you’ve probably looked at how you approach this year’s team and season by comparing it to recent seasons. But does the fact that you won it all in ’23 discourage you from doing that again? And is that helpful?
JJ: That’s a really good question, and I looked at something right before we started this interview, it’s a good quote, “comparison is the thief of joy.” So I really have tried not to do that! There are so many positive things from our first couple years here that we want to emulate as we continue to build our program—player leadership, a culture of selflessness, placing the needs of the team above your own—I definitely want those things to carry forward.
There were some guys on the periphery last year that weren’t in the lineup every day, and we’ve chosen to ride with them and make it their time this year, so of course we don’t have some of the experience that last year’s guys had.
It’s one day at a time, one pitch at a time, get one percent better on a daily basis, put in your 10,000 hours to become an elite college baseball player on an elite college baseball team. The work is very similar as always, the mindset is just a little bit different.