Steve Sabins leads WVU baseball into new era

While his potential remained and he became the first-round draft selection of the St. Louis Cardinals with the seventh overall pick, the spotlight of the season was reflected over to Mazey’s final season, which would be the Mountaineers’ first trip to a Super Regional before handing the position over to his longtime trusted assistant Steve Sabins.

Opening day, which will be Sabins’ debut running the program, is now less than two weeks away and he will be front and center as the 20th coach in school history. He comes in as the focal point of the program, facing the expectations that come with appearing in a super regional and the pressures that are added as replacing Mazey.

The expectations are front and center, the Mountaineers were selected to finish fourth in the Big 12’s preseason poll and with dreams of a trip to Omaha and the first College World Series appearance ever, but expectations are just that — nothing more than dreams that may or may not come true.

There’s a word Sabins uses within the program about expectations.

“Poison,” Sabins said. “You have to be careful with what you ingest. If you fall in love with yourself, you get your butt kicked. If you look ahead, you get your butt kicked. If you get too worked up in what other people think, you get your butt kicked. So, you just try to stay the course, stay focused, get better,”

Expectations, Sabins says, are good but they offer something to shoot for more than speak to what has been accomplished.

“We definitely have some expectations and that’s awesome. We talk about it with our team. There’s expectations, outside noise, external opinions ... All those things are reality,” Sabins said. “Some of those polls and rankings are flattering. They mean the program is doing well.”

But the new coach says you must approach them cautiously.

“Nowadays, look at Arizona State in football. They won the Big 12 Conference,” he said.

It was unexpected as they were picked at or near the bottom of the conference in the preseason.

“No one knows if we are good or not,” Sabins said, getting a grasp on reality. “We replaced half our team from last year through transfer portals and new guys. So, more than half of our roster is new guys. It’s just a massively different team and we have a lot to prove.”

So, Sabins’ approach is to take the selection of being fourth in the conference as a positive, but don’t think it’s the end result.

“It says the coaches in the league believe the program has been trending in the right direction for years; ‘We like their coaches; we like their style of play; we think they have the resources to be competitive’.

While the team has turned over considerably, especially in the pitching staff, the big difference is in the coach. Sabins has no career record to fall back on and he admits he is not the second coming of Mazey.

They are different men with different personas from different eras.

“I’ll probably do a little bit less on the field,” Sabins said. “Coach Mazey came from an era where he had done so much. He’d been a pitching coach at a high level. He’d been a hitting coach at a high level. He’d been an outfield coach at a high level. He was a two-way player in college. He was a pitcher in professional baseball.

“So, when he got here, coaching staffs were smaller. He really relied on his own experience and skills. Coach Mazey called pitches, ran the offense, and made bullpen decisions. He really ran the game.”

That’s something Sabins will share this season with an enlarged staff.

“Coach (Justin) Oney will call pitches. Coach (Christopher) Reilly will help us with decisions on pitchers as far as who’s available. I’ll run the offense. Coach (Jimmy) Reisinger will position the infielders. Coach Drew Hefner will help us with preparation of outfield stuff. Coach (Jacob) Garcia will do the scouting reports,” Sabins said.

“So, it will be a little more diverse when it comes to the coaching aspect of it. That will lead to a little bit more diverse style of play because there’s more variation in the people who have an impact on the game.”

And there is nothing easy about the assignment. What do you do to follow a Super Regional?

“It’s momentum,” Sabins noted. “That’s the name of our game. It’s about recruiting momentum. It’s about season momentum. It’s about getting the right coaches in place, the right players in place.

“I remember when I first got here, we were scrapping for momentum. I remember talking about how we had played in the championship game of the Big 12 Tournament and that’s what I was selling on the phone,” Sabins continued. “’Hey, we got to the Big 12 championship game. We didn’t win it, but we got there. We got into a new stadium. We’re going to build a weight room.

“We were talking about an indoor facility we were going to build 10 years ago. We talked about Alec Manoah, a Top 100 player, coming to West Virginia. It’s all momentum, so I think the super regional is something you grab onto and you sell and try to keep the momentum going while adding new stuff to it.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a Top 25 recruiting class like we have. We hadn’t been to a regional in 21 years. We hadn’t hosted a regional since the 1920s. It was one thing after another and you are looking for that next thing that allows you to sell the program.

“The truth is, I wouldn’t tell a 16-year-old recruit this, but the truth is on the scale of national programs, we haven’t accomplished a lot. We haven’t been to Omaha and the College World Series. We haven’t hosted a Super Regional. We haven’t done a lot of things.

“I always tell recruits, last year was the best year in the 133-year history of the program, it was incredible to be part of. Is that sustainable? We don’t know, but we are going to find out. You are always striving to find the next step. You are always looking to the big picture and that’s what I focus on.

“There’s so much that can be done here, so let’s do it.”

He heads head first into the season and as a first-year coach wants to get moving hard and fast, but knows he must follow the best advice he ever got about running a team.

“I used to always joke with Maze because I was a Type A individual and Maze always laid back and didn’t sweat the small stuff. He was more of an organizer kind of guy and I’d be pulling my hair out. He’d say, ‘Never make a decision until you have to,’” he said.

“I think about that quite a bit because there are so many decisions you have to make in this seat and you want to let that unfold as far as you can, whether that is naming staff members, picking a lineup, locations, travel, meals, bus, whatever it is. You have to let things unfold and get as much information as you can to make quality decisions.”