Kerrick Jackson ready for the daunting task of bringing Mizzou back
The news for Monday was that Missouri introduced Kerrick Jackson as its next baseball coach. Mizzou hired Jackson away from Memphis on Saturday night to replace Steve Bieser, who was fired after seven seasons without an NCAA Tournament bid. It took Jackson all of one sentence to have to pause and fight back tears on Monday morning.
“It’s not very often that you can stand and say ‘Goal accomplished,’” Jackson said before having to gather himself. “This is a special place to me. To be blessed with this opportunity to lead this program, you don’t know how much it means. People have been asking me the last couple days, ‘Has it hit you yet?’ Guess what? It just hit me.”
But by that point, the news of what had happened was already past tense. The focus quickly turns to Jackson’s task: Leading a program back to its former heights—and hopefully beyond—in the best conference in college baseball history.
“It’s a different animal,” former Mizzou infielder Ian Kinsler, who was part of the group that chose Jackson as the Tigers’ next coach, said of the Southeastern Conference. “There’s never been anything like it in college baseball. It’s kind of a first in terms of head and shoulders above the other conferences.”
The SEC had eight teams selected among the 16 national seeds and regional hosts in this year’s NCAA Tournament. No league has ever had as many. Twelve of the 14 teams in the conference have been to a College World Series since 1999. Four made it last season and nine have reached Omaha since 2017—and that doesn’t even include looming additions Oklahoma and Texas who were among the final eight teams standing in 2022.
Missouri finished 12th in the league this year, making its first appearance in the conference tournament since 2019. The Tigers have played ten SEC seasons and only once have managed to win as many games as they lost in league play, going 16-16 in 2015, which, coincidentally, was Jackson’s last year as a Missouri assistant coach and recruiting coordinator. Missouri’s budget and attendance lag far behind all of their conference brethren.
“We’re going to do great things here. I’m not going to put a timetable on it because all good things take time,” Jackson said. “I’m ready for this program to get back to national prominence.”
The question, though, is how? Can it be done in a league where the passion and dollars devoted to college baseball far outpace what has traditionally been shown at Mizzou? Jackson didn’t seem particularly interested in any of that skepticism on Monday.
“Nobody cares why you don’t get something done. Either you get it done or you don’t. The reason why you do or you don’t doesn’t really matter,” he said. “When you’re at this level, if you’re not trying to win a championship at the national level and you’re not trying to play at the highest level, you need to go do something else. And we don’t have any reasons why we can’t do that. From our mound to our plate is 60 feet 6 inches like anywhere else, from home plate to first base is 90 feet like anywhere else.”
It’s a good message. It’s the only one Jackson can really send. But is it realistic? Director of Athletics Desiree Reed-Francois admitted Mizzou has to find a different way to do things than many of the other teams in college baseball’s Goliath of a league.
“We’re not looking for people who make excuses,” Reed-Francois said. “We’re competitors. This is a competitive league. We’re going to give him every opportunity to be successful. But how we’re going to be competitive here is out peopling people. We’re not going to have the budget here that Texas has. But you know what? We’re going to keep incrementally growing our budget and provide our coaches the things they need to be successful. We’re going to hire great people who are very smart and hard working and who are going to look at a problem and see an opportunity and then they’re going to look at creative ways to do things.”
Kinsler believes it can be done because he’s seen it done. From 2003 to 2009 the Tigers won at least 35 games every season, made seven straight NCAA Tournament appearances, hosted a regional and made a Super Regional.
“When I was here in the Big 12, our facilities were not what they are now at Missouri,” Kinsler said. “We had outdoor cages. We shared Devine with all of the other sports. And we competed against Texas and A&M and Oklahoma and teams that had a lot of things, bells and whistles and facilities, and we seemed to beat them every year. That’s not really how you determine if your team can win or not.
“In sports, that’s the great thing about it. If you have the right people and you have the right goals and you do it the right way and the process is correct, anything can happen.”
Still, the investment has to happen. Reed-Francois said the athletic department spent about $150,000 more dollars on baseball this year than the year before. She said that money went to travel, staff salaries and a full-time strength coach. She said Missouri understands it will have to continue to up the investment. The outfield needs to be turfed.
“Our sound system is falling apart,” she said. “Our scoreboard literally is falling apart.”
The common cry from Missouri fans is a new place to play to replace Taylor Stadium. Reed-Francois said it’s something she has to study. If it happens, it’s clear it isn’t happening quickly. For longer term goals like that, Kinsler and some of his fellow Major League Baseball products from Mizzou might need to be leaned upon heavily. Missouri’s connection to its past is something that Kinsler said has gone missing in recent years.
“It hasn’t been there the last however many years,” he said. “It just hasn’t. I don’t know the reason for that. I haven’t talked to each guy individually, but it just hasn’t been there.
“When I was here, there was always a feeling, Tony Vitello was a volunteer assistant, and there were always guys around, ex-players. They were coming back just to hang out and show a presence. That was always cool to me. These guys want to be here. It’s a special place and they want to come back. It reminds them of good times.”
Asked how he can foster that connection, Jackson said. “I’m pretty fortunate that I know a bunch of them already.”
Jackson said he talked to Rick Zagone and Kyle Gibson since taking the job. Kinsler said a number of alumni were driving in from across the state for an afternoon reception for Jackson.
“The ball’s starting to roll already,” Kinsler said. “Like Kerrick said, it starts today. There’s no reason to wait on something like that.”
There’s no easy fix. Missouri has to climb up from the bottom. How daunting is the SEC? The last two national champions—Mississippi State and Ole Miss—are the only two teams who finished below the Tigers in the conference standings this year. The last time the Tigers had a successful baseball program on a national stage, Tim Jamieson was the head coach. He was Jackson’s pitching coach at Memphis this year and could follow him back to Columbia in some capacity.
“I asked him, ‘Am I crazy?” Jackson said. “No better person for me to lean on than him to say am I crazy to think we can be one of the nation’s top programs? He said ‘we were on that track, so no you’re not.’”
Jackson’s job is to get it there. It starts immediately.
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