Nick Mingione gets emotional celebrating Kentucky players’ success

On Monday, the Kentucky baseball team wasn’t sure if their season was over. After losing their final four games ahead of selection Sunday, the Wildcats were considered a bubble team for the NCAA Baseball Tournament.

Alas, on Monday afternoon, Kentucky players and staff alike celebrated when they heard their name called. Less than 24 hours after the jaw-dropping moment, Kentucky head coach Nick Mingione was still emotional when asked what the most gratifying part of the experience was.

“You trying to make me cry?” Mingione said. “It happened yesterday. It happened yesterday. Just watching our guys celebrate yesterday was — shew. It’s been a highlight.

“Christen (Mingione’s wife) and Reeves (Mingione’s son) were there, and I just watched them celebrate. I looked at her, and she’s in tears, and I’m in tears, and I told them yesterday, I was like, ‘Listen, when you guys have families one day and you have an opportunity to have children, if that’s what you choose to do, and or if you lead an organization or a business, to watch your people celebrate with pure joy, it’s my favorite thing on the field, or being involved in college athletics to witness.’

“To watch a group of individuals, our coaches, our staff, our players, to watch the pure excitement and emotion. That was my favorite part of the season – to watch them celebrate.”

Kentucky will be a 3-seed in the Clemson Regional. Along with Clemson, obviously, the Regional will include 2-seed West Virginia and 4-seed USC Upstate.

This is only Kentucky’s 10th appearance in the NCAA Baseball Tournament in program history. Four of those appearances have been during head coach Nick Mingione‘s tenure. Mingione couldn’t be prouder of his players for their resilience.

“No one will understand the amount of hard work and discipline it took, no one will understand the sacrifices that they had to make,” Mingione said. “No one is going to know all of the time they spent extra time in the cages, working on their delivery, watching video, no one will understand the amount of time, effort and energy it took to get to this spot, but they do.”

The Wildcats finished their regular season with a 29-23 overall record and a 13-17 mark in conference play. Of course, a 13-17 record in the notoriously strong SEC is nothing to scoff at.

Amid its ups and downs, Kentucky put together some solid moments on its résumé, namely when it won series against Tennessee and Oklahoma. Now, Mingione is ready to see his team find their stride in the postseason.

“Here we are now, doing something that’s never been done in Kentucky baseball history, we’re playing in our third straight NCAA Regional,” Mingione said. “I couldn’t be more proud of the guys and our staff because I’ve been in this situation before as a head coach. When we lost that many people, we finished dead last in the SEC. We are now five wins away from going back to the College World Series.