How College World Series appearance is full circle for Notre Dame, Link Jarrett
Link Jarrett has no idea where the banner came from. To him, somehow it just appeared. Magically. As magically as Notre Dame turned a two-run deficit against Tennessee into a one-run advantage in a span of a couple swings — a couple minutes — this past Sunday.
That happens all the time in baseball. It hardly happens with a College World Series berth on the line. Not exactly like that. Not against that Tennessee team.
This rendition of the Fighting Irish, led by head coach Jarrett, will forever hold a place in program lore — no matter what happens in Omaha this weekend. It’s only the third team in program history to reach the CWS. And the players who comprise it have not forgotten of the last.
The banner says 2002. Irish players draped themselves in it like track and field athletes who medal in the Olympics while celebrating on the field at Lindsey Nelson Stadium in Knoxville, Tenn., as Super Regional champions. This trip to Omaha isn’t just about the 2022 Notre Dame baseball team. It’s also about the one who showed these guys two decades ago that it’s not impossible for a team from northern Indiana to reach the pinnacle of a sport born, bred and bled in the south.
Jarrett fielded a call from former Notre Dame head coach Paul Mainieri inside a Starbucks in North Carolina two and a half years ago. He sat there for 40 minutes, pen in hand, paper placed on the table, jotting down everything he could. When one of two (now three) coaches to ever take Notre Dame to the College World Series calls, you don’t just listen.
You absorb every ounce.
“That was call one,” Jarrett said. “His continued advice on how to navigate some of the things that make Notre Dame special but unique — he got it.”
Nick Mainieri, Paul’s son, a former Notre Dame player for his father and the Irish’s academic advisor for the baseball team, has served as the liaison of sorts between Jarrett and the elder Mainieri. The two had countless conversations about travel, classes, when to practice, how long to practice, what days to have study hall, what days to lift.
Everything.
Nick Mainieri saw what worked for his father. He saw what snapped a 45-year drought between Notre Dame’s first trip to Omaha and its second. Why wouldn’t he share those state secrets? He bleeds blue and gold too, after all.
“Those guys got me off the ground here,” Jarrett said.
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Mainieri came back with players from the 2002 team for a pregame ceremony at Eck Stadium in South Bend on April 29. Jarrett thought that’s when the banner showed up. Graduate senior catcher David LaManna refuted the theory. Mainieri said he hadn’t seen it since 2003. No way he came bearing the banner if he didn’t even know where it was.
“It’s just been passed down,” LaManna said.
From player to player, team to team. Contrary to what outsiders may think, Notre Dame baseball players aren’t there to play ball for four years, get their degrees and leave. The academic rigor that comes with it sets them up for the future. Undoubtedly. But every college baseball player anywhere — Texas, Georgia Southern, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame — wants to play in the College World Series.
For 20 years, nobody at Notre Dame could say they had. Until now.
“Truly, it’s a dream come true,” graduate senior left fielder Ryan Cole said. “(I remember) watching this event on TV as a little kid and growing up, dreaming that one day I’d be here.”
“When you kind of walk down that tunnel and step onto the field for the first time, you’re kind of speechless just because this is every college baseball player’s dream,” senior first baseman Carter Putz said.
Dream no more. It’s reality now. Just like it was for Mainieri. Just like it was for Jarrett three times as a player at Florida State in the 1990s. Just like it was for Jarrett’s son, J.T., last year as a member of the NC State Wolfpack.
That run ended unceremoniously with the Wolfpack getting bounced altogether due to COVID-19 guidelines despite being just one win away from the championship series. In that, what Jarrett called “the worst outcome you could ever envision,” there’s this: it’s never going to be that bad. A team likely won’t ever get sent home in that fashion again. But teams will get sent home the natural way in the next week and a half. Seven of them.
The 2002 Notre Dame team didn’t win it all. Jarrett didn’t in three tries as the Seminoles’ shortstop. A national championship? That’s still a dream. If obtained, it comes with a banner whose location won’t ever be questioned.
It’ll forever hang proudly on Notre Dame’s campus.
