OMAHA, Neb. —Coastal Carolina and LSU have met on the baseball field just twice, but their number of all-time meetings are about to double — at least — because they’re the two teams that have reached the College World Series finals that start Saturday night at Charles Schwab Field Omaha.
Those two games back in 2016 have not been forgotten by either program.
Coastal Carolina swept the host Tigers in the NCAA Division I tournament’s Baton Rouge Super Regional on the way to its first College World Series appearance and first national championship. The Chanticleers’ opponent in the CWS finals that year was Arizona. Jay Johnson, now at LSU, was Arizona’s coach at the time.
Tigers outfielder Jake Brown was 11 years old and living in Sulphur, Louisiana, back then, and he recalled Friday how the players on that LSU team were superheroes to him.
“A little bit of heartbreak,” he said Friday. “That was a great team, a team I think could have made a good run in the championship. Obviously, things didn’t go our way that time. Looking forward to turning it around and making something good happen for us this time.”
LSU (51-15) will be playing for its eighth national championship and second in three years, having missed the CWS altogether in 2024. Coastal Carolina (56-11), which enters the best-of-three CWS finals on a 26-game winning streak, is going for its second title in its second CWS appearance.
“That would put Coastal Carolina baseball on a different planet,” said Chanticleers coach Kevin Schnall, who was an assistant on the 2016 team and took over when Gary Gilmore retired last season after 29 years at the helm for the program from Conway, South Carolina.
Sophomore right-hander Cameron Flukey (8-1), who pitched four innings of relief against Arizona on June 13 in the first game of this year’s eight-team CWS, will start for Coastal Carolina in the CWS finals opener that will be televised by ESPN at 7 p.m. Eastern.
Johnson has not named his starter, but LSU ace Kade Anderson (11-1), the sophomore left-hander who limited Arkansas to three hits and struck out seven batters in seven innings last Saturday in the CWS opener for both teams, is available.
The second game is set for 2:30 p.m. Sunday. If a third game is necessary, it will be played at 7:30 p.m. Monday.
The Chanticleers — the Sun Belt Conference champions who were the No. 13 national seed when the 64-team NCAA tournament began last month — and No. 6 LSU each went 3-0 in double-elimination bracket play in Omaha over the past week. LSU had to beat No. 3 Arkansas twice, winning the bracket final 6-5 in walk-off fashion Wednesday night after a wild three-run ninth inning between the Southeastern Conference rivals.
LSU’s Brown is 4-for-6 with four RBIs in three CWS games, while Jared Jones is 5-for-9 with two home runs and six RBIs in his past two games after striking out five times in the opener against Arkansas. Tigers pitchers have walked just four batters in 27 innings in Omaha.
“I think if you’re at this point in the NCAA tournament, you’ve been battle-tested,” Johnson said. “I don’t believe there’s anything we have not seen. … I feel like we’re well trained and well prepared for, in my opinion, probably the best team that we’ve played this year in Coastal.”
The Chanticleers have yet to hit a home run at this year’s CWS, but they’ve had plenty of big hits that took advantage of the gaps and the corners at the rangy ballpark in Omaha. Colby Thorndyke has two bases-clearing doubles and is 5-for-12 with eight RBIs, while Dean Mihos is 5-for-12 with a double and triple. Their pitchers have walked four batters in 25 innings.
Johnson, in his fourth year at LSU after six at Arizona, said his heart still aches for his 2016 Wildcats team. Arizona erased a 4-0 deficit against the Chanticleers in the decisive third game of the CWS finals and stranded a runner at third base in the bottom of the ninth inning.
“We were one base hit away, and it took a couple of years to get past that,” Johnson said. “I think what I do remember about all of that is it has really helped me the next three times that we’ve been here in terms of knowing how to prepare for this.”
Brown drew laughs at Friday’s news conference when he explained the straightforward and simple way Johnson prepares him and his teammates to play.
“We came here to play baseball,” he said. “We’re not really scholars.”
Being prepared from the get-go is important when facing the Chanticleers, who have made fast starts a distinguishing feature of their offense. Coastal Carolina has outscored its three CWS opponents by a combined 11-0 in the first inning and is 37-2 when its scores first in 2025, the best in Division I baseball this year.
LSU is 32-7 this year when it opens the scoring. Getting into a shootout with the Tigers in Omaha is usually a bad idea. LSU has won 16 straight CWS games when scoring at least five runs since losing 9-5 to Miami in 2004.
Another feature of Coastal Carolina’s offense is productive pain.
The Chanticleers lead the country with a program-record 176 batters hit by pitches this season, breaking the University of California Irvine’s single-season record of 175 from last year. The Chanticleers have been plunked six times in three CWS games.
“They don’t eat if they get out of the way,” Schnall said during Friday’s news conference, drawing laughs. “No, it’s just something that our guys have bought into. Our guys are obsessed with getting on base. They understand the way you score runs is having guys on base. And any way you can get on base helps our team win.”
Schnall makes it a point to remind the media that the Chanticleers are a national power even if they’re not part of a power conference, but that doesn’t mean that, at least way back in February, he expected the 2025 team to play for a national championship.
“We were picked fourth in the Sun Belt,” he said. “No problem. We’ll move forward, keep our head down and keep grinding. That’s what this team did. But we clearly felt like this pitching staff was going to be the best pitching staff we ever had.”
The Chanticleers were 19-8 on March 29 and are 37-3 since.