While the Clemson Tigers football team sucks up a lot of the attention right now, the baseball team is quietly preparing for next spring, when it hopes to make a run all the way to the men’s College World Series in Omaha, Neb.

Tigers baseball coach Erik Bakich has been there twice. In 2002, he was the Tigers’ volunteer assistant coach. Then, in 2019, he led Michigan to its first MCWS since 1984 and was named the NCBWA National Coach of the Year.

That’s what got Bakich the job at Clemson before the 2023 season. His success at Michigan — and before that Maryland — and a desire to return to the Tigers.

It’s not his alma mater. Bakich went to East Carolina, where he played for Keith LeClair, who was a protégé of Clemson’s legendary coach, Jack Leggett.

But it feels that way, he said to the Greenville News during a media day on Wednesday.

“I started here, I love it here,” he said. “Everyone has a certain fondness and reverence for their alma mater. I certainly have mine playing for Keith LeClair at East Carolina, one of Coach Leggett’s proteges. But I got to start here.”

Two years after his playing career ended with the Pirates — where he was selected as an all-conference player — and after a brief dalliance with pro baseball, he went to Clemson to work for Leggett. It was his first coaching job and it was not glamorous, he said.

“The start here was to get paid in Gatorade bars and T-shirts and to wake up every day excited about coming to Clemson, and fell in love with Clemson, and that never changed, that never wavered,” he said.

Leggett wasn’t going anywhere. He led the Tigers until 2015. If Bakich wanted to be a head coach, he’d have to do it somewhere else.

He was an assistant at Vanderbilt for six years before getting the Maryland job in 2010 and then the Michigan job in 2013. He was nearly a decade in with the Wolverines when he had the chance to return — but only, he said, under the right circumstances.  

“This was always a destination to aspire to come back, if the stars were to align, and it could happen the right way,” he said. “Not with Coach Leggett being let go, right? That’s not the way. But with him coming back, there’s nowhere else we want to be.”

Monte Lee took over the job in 2016 and was let go in 2022. The Tigers lured Bakich away from Ann Arbor and he tapped Leggett to head up program development.

In two seasons Bakich is already 88-35 with two NCAA Tournament berths and a Super Regionals bid last year. With success comes the potential for better jobs. Bakich doesn’t believe there’s a better one out there.

“I trace everything back to, had not been for Clemson, I wouldn’t have been able to start coaching,” he said. “Because of that, there is a high level of loyalty. No interest in going anywhere else, and never did.”