Timing Everything For Mazey As He Wraps Up His Mountaineer Career

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Do you remember those great house parties in college back in the day when everything seemed so perfect? 

The music was terrific, the guests were interesting, and everybody was having a great time. And to cap a memorable evening, the party ended at precisely the right time without that one straggler hanging around in the kitchen trying to squeeze another hour of fun out of something that just wasn’t there. 

That’s what Randy Mazey, who turns 58 later this month, is avoiding later this spring when he officially retires after 12 successful seasons as West Virginia University’s baseball coach.

His final weekend series coaching at Kendrick Family Ballpark against Kansas State takes place this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Sure, there is still plenty of gas left in the tank, as evidenced by this year’s record and his team’s push for another NCAA regional appearance - something West Virginia baseball couldn’t do from 1996 until 2017 - but perfect timing is somewhat of an artform and Mazey is a master when it comes to that.

“One thing that Maze always told us, ‘A baseball coach is a job, but it’s not what you are about. It’s about relationships,’” former Mazey assistant and Texas State head coach Steven Trout said earlier this week. “Yes, building the brand of West Virginia baseball is a huge thing, but I think for him all the relationships he’s built that will continue is most important to him. He’s going to live in the area. He’s always enjoyed his family time, hunting and fishing, so to me, baseball was his job, but it wasn’t his life. That’s something I’ve tried to carry in my life.”

“In our business,” says Derek Matlock, another former Mazey assistant now leading Texas Rio Grande Valley’s baseball program, “I have missed so many of my son’s baseball games, and the one thing I had so much respect for Randy is he wasn’t going to miss stuff. He would move practice times to watch his kids play games. That’s a great father!

“That was something that I took, and Randy taught me that,” Matlock said. “It’s rare among power conference coaches, for sure, because it’s such a rat race to keep a contract and to win. I admire him so much how great of a dad he is and that has always been his No. 1 priority, not baseball. That’s not common.”

WVU associate head coach Steve Sabins, Mazey’s hand-picked successor in agreement with WVU Director of Athletics Wren Baker, will be sliding one seat over in the dugout after this year. He said he first met Mazey at, of all things, a party Mazey and his wife, Amanda, had once hosted for some coaches.

Sabins was then a volunteer assistant coach at Oklahoma State and the Cowboys were making their first trip to Morgantown. Mazey knew some of the OSU guys from his days working at TCU, and he invited them over to his house for some food and fellowship.

“Randy was pretty good buddies with Marty Lees, who was on the Oklahoma State staff at the time, and Randy invited the whole coaching staff over to dinner on Thursday night after we got into town,” Sabins recalled. “So, two or three of us ended up going over there, and I was just a young dude then, a volunteer, probably just 24 or 25 at the time. I thought it was pretty damn cool that I was having dinner at a head coach’s house.

“He likes people. He likes to be social, and he likes to invite people into his home,” Sabins said. “If he has a chance to go home and eat by himself or have the whole staff and team over, he’s picking the staff and team 100 times out of 100.”

Because of Mazey’s generosity and willingness to be around others, nearly 100 former players recently returned to Morgantown for an alumni weekend that ended up drawing more than 11,500 fans during a three-game series against Baylor, including 4,432 for the Saturday afternoon game against the Bears. 

His team had just set the Kendrick Family Ballpark attendance record of 4,614 a week prior during a midweek game against rival Pitt. Alums from all eras – including many players who never played for Mazey – come back because Randy has made it a point to let them know they are appreciated.

“Relationships are paramount to him,” Matt Wells, West Virginia’s deputy director of athletics for external affairs, points out. Matt has worked closely with Mazey for the last 11 years as the department’s baseball administrator. “His impact on that part of the program has been significant, whether it’s players such as Rick Wagener or Kevin Olkowski, who didn’t play for Randy. 

“That’s been crucial to us getting alums involved in coming back for events,” Wells said. “That was something Randy talked about from the very beginning.”

The beginning for Mazey at West Virginia University came on June 6, 2012, when he was hired two seasons after helping TCU to its first-ever College World Series appearance in 2010.

Mazey played at Clemson and then briefly in the Cleveland Indians organization before his coaching career began at his alma mater. Then, Charleston Southern hired him to take over its baseball program in 1994. Three years later, after leading the Buccaneers to an NCAA regional in 1996, Mazey took a power conference assistant coaching position at Georgia. 

Stints at East Carolina and Tennessee led to him getting the East Carolina head coaching job in 2003. Mazey led the Pirates to a 51-win season and a Super Regional appearance in 2004 before moving on to become TCU’s pitching coach in 2006.

Six years later, West Virginia needed a proven coach to revive its sagging baseball fortunes. The Mountaineers had slipped to last place in the Big East standings and were confronted with what former athletic director Oliver Luck termed an “existential existence.”

Luck had just engineered West Virginia’s move to the Big 12, but he wasn’t certain that baseball was going to be viable in the new league. It played in antiquated Hawley Field and wasn’t getting the financial support its competitors were receiving.

The first question Luck needed to answer was could WVU baseball be competitive in the Big 12? To find out, he got on the phone and began talking to people he knew in the industry. He called Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick, a WVU alum, and he talked to Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

He also dialed up Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard to inquire about the Cyclones’ decision to drop baseball following the 2001 season.

All options were on the table.

Luck decided to put together a working group of staffers and outsiders to determine if baseball could succeed in the Big 12, and the Diamondbacks and Pirates lent some of their personnel people for additional expertise. What came out of those meetings was that, yes, baseball could be feasible at WVU provided that a new facility was constructed, and a coach with a developmental background who was familiar with the climate challenges in the Northeast was hired.

“Their message was, ‘Don’t hire a coach who spent his entire career in Arizona, Southern California or wherever because they’re not going to appreciate the nuance of that Pennsylvania kid who probably also played football and basketball, too,” Luck recalled earlier this week. “They said, ‘If you can find someone who understands that dynamic in our neighboring states, that’s going to be a big plus.’”

Luck also wanted a coach with a pitching background. As a former college and professional quarterback, Luck likens pitchers to quarterbacks in the sport of which he’s most familiar.

“If I recall correctly, I think I interviewed three or four pitching experts, if you will, with an understanding of the geography and the type of climate we have here,” he said. “Randy did a phenomenal job down at East Carolina and then at TCU. 

“It all came together very nicely.”

With that important question settled, the other significant issue was developing a plan to build a new ballpark. This happened to be right in Luck’s wheelhouse because he once oversaw the Harris County Sports Authority, which came up with the financing plans to construct Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and the basketball arena today known as the Toyota Center in downtown Houston. 

Nothing at the time was concrete, but Luck understood how to move the process along through state and local agencies.

“There were really two steps,” he explained. “The first one was, ‘Yes, baseball can succeed in Morgantown, West Virginia’ That was the existential question that we had, and the second step was, ‘Okay, for baseball to succeed at West Virginia University, what do we have to do? Build a stadium.’ Then you get into the details of TIFs (tax-increment financing) and all that stuff, of which I was very fluent, and I was able to inject myself into that pretty quickly.

“There was no hesitation in my confidence that we could get it done,” Luck added. “I’ve worked with municipalities in the past, and I know for a fact that Randy wouldn’t have entertained the idea of coming here unless there was a pretty good stadium plan in place that was implementable and doable.”

But that wasn’t going to happen overnight, which Mazey understood. 

The decision was made to play Big 12 home games in Charleston and Beckley his first season in 2013, meaning conference home games required a 2½ hour bus ride one way on Thursday nights before the weekend series began on Friday. When you include commercial flights for conference road games, this plan was clearly unsustainable, so the decision was made to bite the bullet and play baseball games at Hawley Field for a year.

In the meantime, Mazey informed his guys that it was going to be a couple of years of tireless work for the entire baseball staff.

“I remember him telling us at our first retreat meeting, “Guys, you are going to have to give 24/7 energy to WVU baseball until we can get this turned. In two or three years when we do it, then we’ll be able to take a breath,’” Matlock said. 

Matlock remembers it taking him three weeks to sign his deal with West Virginia because he had to get out and immediately start looking for prospects.

“I took the job, and I was on the road for 20 days straight before I got back there to sign my contract. I signed John Means and was on the road just trying to get players,” he said. “We had 3½ scholarships to give so we were trying to get some pieces that could help right away.

“It was a fight because I was getting beat on the East Coast by all the ACC teams, so I just went to Texas. I got lucky with (Alek) Manoah (from Miami), but Jackson Cramer was a Texas kid and there were some things that happened along the way that was pretty cool, but then I think Sabins coming in played a big part in pushing things back toward the East Coast.”

Sabins did so, but it wasn’t easy.

“Recruiting is hard here, but we’ve been insanely successful as far as on the field and with the draft,” Sabins admitted. “We get a lot more ‘nos’ than the University of Texas. We don’t always get a ‘yes’ because guys will ask if we are playing in snow, or they have never been to West Virginia. The kids who are just about baseball, personal development, getting better and playing in front of big crowds, a lot of times we’ll get ‘yesses’ from those guys and those are the dudes you actually want.”

The year before Monongalia County Ballpark opened, today known as Wagener Field at Kendrick Family Ballpark, West Virginia spent a season in 2014 playing out Hawley Field’s existence.

Mazey actually took perverse pleasure sitting in the dugout down at Hawley Field watching the look on the players’ and coaches’ faces when they got off the bus in the Shell Building parking lot for the long walk down to the visitor’s dugout. Meanwhile, his guys were getting dressed in their cars parked right next to the visitors’ team bus.

“The first time Texas came to Morgantown in 2014, Roger Clemens was there with Calvin Schiraldi, and they were standing down the right field line along the fence watching the game with Charlie O’Brien, whose son Cam was a catcher for the Mountaineers that year,” Jeff Culhane, then WVU baseball’s broadcaster, recalled. Culhane is today the radio voice of the Florida State Seminoles.

“We were at practice on Thursday; I stopped by to talk to Randy, and he looked at me with this wry smile and says, ‘What do you think Augie Garrido is going to do when I tell him his only restroom option is using the porta potty behind the first base dugout?’” Culhane laughed. 

During one of the games, Culhane was given an angry tweet Greg Swindell sent out about him mispronouncing C.J. Hinojosa’s name during the live webcast.

“Apparently, I was carrying the ‘E’ instead of the ‘Auh’ in Hinojosa, and (baseball sports information director) Grant Dovey walked in the booth and said, ‘Hey, Greg Swindell just tweeted that you were pronouncing Hinojosa’s name wrong.’ I said, ‘Who is Greg Swindell?’ He said, ‘World Series champion, all-star, Longhorn Network, etc.’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay.’”

West Virginia ended up taking two of three from the 11th-ranked Longhorns that weekend in front of some big crowds. Don’t discount the early success Mazey’s teams had in Big 12 play with respect to the construction of the new ballpark. Had the Mountaineers fallen on their faces in 2013 and finished last in the league standings, instead of third, who knows if the State Legislature approves the TIF funding for the new ballpark?

It took a late-spring special session to eventually get it passed that year.

“Thank God for (governor) Earl Ray (Tomblin),” Luck laughed. “I used to joke all the time that we had to go into extra innings to get the deal done, but we got it done.”

Once the new ballpark opened in 2015, it was only a matter of time before Mazey’s program was going to take off like a balloon held under water. West Virginia ended its 21-year NCAA Tournament drought in 2017, played host to a regional for the first time in 64 years in 2019 and returned to the tournament last year.

Eight Mazey-coached WVU players have reached the big leagues, including 2019 first-rounder Alek Manoah, and more than $8 million in signing bonuses have been paid out to his players so far. That figure should approach $10 million later this summer once star player J.J. Wetherholt is selected.

Before Mazey, West Virginia was an afterthought in the national rankings. Not anymore. Mazey’s teams have been ranked 17 different times in the coaches’ poll since 2017 and have been in one poll or another regularly since then. 

From 1999 until 2012, West Virginia played just 36 games against nationally ranked teams, winning five. Mazey’s teams have 52 wins against nationally ranked opponents as of today.

His record in Big 12 play over the last three years is an impressive 44-28.

One of the largest crowds to ever watch a game at Hawley Field was the 1,077 that showed up in 1997 to see Chris Enochs pitch against Notre Dame. The Mountaineers had twice as many for their final home game at Hawley Field against Texas in 2014.

Now, the new ballpark regularly sees crowds exceeding 3,000 for games in April and May, including the more than 4,600 that came out for the Pitt game on April 16. Had there been more seats, there could have easily been 5,000 or 6,000 show up for some of these big games. 

Wednesday night's non-conference home game against Penn State was televised nationally on ESPN2.

That’s how much interest has grown in WVU baseball during the 12 years Randy Mazey has been here. As someone who has seen games going back to the Dale Ramsburg years, it’s been a pure joy to watch.

“I’ll never forget that first night at the new ballpark and how special it was for Randy and for everybody involved,” Culhane said. “It really took the program to that next level, and I think to a place many people believed West Virginia baseball would never go to.

“A lot of people were resigned to the fact of, ‘Oh, this is how it’s always going to be. We’re stuck here, and we’re not going to be able to do it,’” Culhane said. “But because of Randy’s early success, and Oliver’s backing and the support from the state, here is this state-of-the-art baseball stadium. To this day, in my career calling college baseball, that setting is as good as it gets.

“You would have never thought that would have been the case in 1985 or 1995 that West Virginia baseball would have one of the elite venues in the entire country,” Culhane added.

No, you wouldn’t.

Randy Mazey was the right guy at the right time for West Virginia University baseball. His aggressive, exciting style of play, his willingness to embrace Mountain State values and desire to welcome everyone with open arms has helped a once struggling program thrive again, as it did many years ago when WVU Hall of Fame coach Steve Harrick was regularly winning Southern Conference titles and taking teams to the NCAA Tournament.

Some of those Harrick players are still around, and a handful of them even return to Morgantown each year to watch Mazey’s teams play. You can sense the great pride they feel for being a part of something that is once again important to people throughout the state.

“This is my 35th year in college baseball, and what people don’t understand is the leadership it takes to turn a place around is unreal,” Matlock said. “You have to have all parts. You have to have the ability to develop guys, recruit talent and you have to have kids committed to staying there and buying into your culture.

“Randy can do it all. He just has a real good feel for everything,” Matlock said.

“I got to play for him my last year at TCU, and I learned so much from him and the things we do today are a lot of the things Maze taught us as a player, and obviously coaching with him at West Virginia,” Trout said. “He’s so well-rounded in all aspects of the game. It’s not just pitching or Mazeyball and the small-ball stuff. He literally knows every facet of the game at a really high level.”

Sabins is the next coach in line, and he understands that the bar has now been raised significantly under Mazey.

“When I got here, we hadn’t been to a regional in more than 20 years and I knew that coming in,” he said. “In this timeframe, we have been to three regionals, hosted a regional, had first rounders, eight guys playing in the big leagues, a $30 million stadium that is frequently sold out, a staff size that’s doubled, 30 student managers … the list goes on. All those things speak to the program’s success since Randy has been the coach here.”

“You never know how a hire turns out, but it was awesome that he had some success early when we were playing quality teams, obviously,” Luck said. “Then, all of a sudden, you’ve got a couple thousand people at the ballpark when the new place opens, and now we’ve got 4,500 coming out to games. That’s unbelievable.”

Wells, probably better than anybody, can quantify what Randy Mazey has meant to Mountaineer baseball over the years.

“He has always had an eye on the long-term impact of the program,” he explained. “It’s about leaving a solid foundation in place for coach Sabins to build on and one day people will look back and say, ‘Hey, Randy Mazey played a huge role in building WVU baseball and whatever it’s going to look like for the next 20, 50 years.”

Indeed, he is leaving things much better than they were when he got here a little more than a decade ago.

Twelve years really doesn’t seem like a long time, but it was long enough for Randy Mazey to make his mark here - and short enough for him to always keep things interesting.

And just like that perfect party, it is ending at the right time, with nobody left hanging around in the kitchen afterward.