Coastal baseball season over. What’s next for coach Kevin Schnall?
Coastal Carolina baseball won’t make the trip to Omaha this year.
Head coach Kevin Schnall and the Chanticleers lost 2-1 to Florida State on Sunday. The loss eliminates Coastal Carolina from the NCAA Tournament. The Chanticleers went 0-2 in the Tallahassee Regional and ended their season with a 37-23 record.
Florida State, the No. 10 overall seed and host of the regional, will play the winner of a game between St. John’s and Northern Illinois Sunday night.
Game continues after Saturday’s bad weather
Coastal and Florida State only played four innings of baseball in its elimination game Sunday. The game had started at 2 p.m. Saturday but only five innings of ball were played before two separate weather delays resulted in the game being postponed later that night.
FSU and Coastal were locked in pitchers duel before the weather kicked in. Wes Mendes struck out eight batters while allowing two hits and a run for the Seminoles. Cameron Flukey gave up just two hits and a run for the Chanticleers.
The Seminoles led 2-1 when the game was resumed in the sixth inning on Sunday. Cal Fisher, FSU’s third baseman, gave the Seminoles the lead after a solo homer in the fifth inning on Saturday.
The pitchers duel continued into the portion of the game played Sunday morning.
Florida State pitcher Trey Beard was lights out on the mound. In his four innings of work he struck out nine batters and allowed Coastal to tally just one hit.
Beard didn’t get much help from his offense. Florida State got one hit in each of the final three innings of the game and stranded each runner, but in the end it wasn’t needed.
Coastal got the tying runner on base with one out in the ninth but left him stranded.
What’s next for Kevin Schnall and Coastal Carolina?
Was Sunday the last time Chanticleer fans will see Kevin Schall donning the teal and black?
Only time will tell.
Earlier this week, D1Baseball national insider Kendall Rogers reported that “barring a last-second surprise,” Schnall and West Virginia head coach Steve Sabins are the two leading candidates for South Carolina baseball’s head coaching vacancy.
On May 26, Schnall confirmed to SportsTalk’s Phil Kornblut his agent had contact with a search firm about the Gamecocks’ opening but hadn’t spoken with USC brass personally.
Schnall has been considered the fan favorite (and reported frontrunner) for quite some time. The Coastal alum has been with the program for just about all of its rise to prominence. Schnall was an assistant for the Chanticleers from 2001-12 and assistant head coach from 2016-2024.
Here’s what Schnall said in Tallahassee Sunday when he was asked about his future at Coastal:
“I’ve got a five-year contract at Coastal. I’m the head baseball coach at Coastal Carolina. Can’t stress it enough,” Schnall said. “In the last 25 years, we got the fifth best winning percentage in the entire country, the sixth most wins in the entire country. The past decade, we’ve got the most wins in the state of South Carolina. We’ve been to Omaha twice. We won a national championship, we were in the national championship finals last year. Only four teams in the last 12 years have advanced to the College World Series finals multiple times: Vanderbilt, Florida, LSU, Coastal Carolina. As long as we continue to be successful, people are going to continue to call Coastal Carolina to gauge interest in us, in their jobs. I don’t blame them. I would too.”
In 2025, Schnall’s was named Coastal’s head coach. The Chanticleers won a program-record 56 wins in his first season at the helm of the program and were runners-up in the men’s College World Series Finals. This season, Coastal finished 37-23 with an NCAA Tournament appearance.
USC’s timeline to fill its head coaching vacancy isn’t set in stone, athletic director Jeremiah Donati told The State. Now that Coastal is eliminated it’s possible the process could speed up if Schnall winds up being the pick for the job.
Again, only time will tell.
This story was originally published May 31, 2026 at 12:06 PM.
