Wildcats on accelerated ascent in Johnson’s first season

For all that’s been said and written this last week and a half about coach Gary Gilmore’s 21-year push to get Coastal Carolina into the College World Series and now to college baseball’s championship series, coach Jay Johnson took a wholly different – and equally impressive – route with Arizona.

Johnson has the Wildcats in this best-of-three CWS championship series in just his first season with the program, after coming over from Nevada last summer.

“What Jay has done in a very short period of time is incredible. Obviously he’s a whole lot smarter than I am because he got here a lot faster than I did,” Gilmore joked.

As much as Coastal Carolina (53-17) is a surprise making it this far in its first-ever College World Series appearance, Arizona (48-22) also exceeded expectations after going 31-24 last season while missing the NCAA postseason for the third straight year.

Shortly after Johnson was hired last June after just two seasons at Nevada, he reached out to the players he was inheriting and expressed his belief that the Wildcats had the talent to be better immediately.

“Skip mentioned to us that he had guys on the roster that could play better than what they have and he wanted to get the best version of ourselves, so that’s something he really stressed toward us and really helped us in our improvement,” senior second baseman Cody Ramer said. “… It was definitely a quick transition. He called maybe a couple days after he got the job and just built a foundation over the phone that we players really believed in and trusted him.”

Added senior right fielder Zach Gibbons: “Right when he took over he told us seniors that he wanted it to be the best last year of our [college careers], to go out and grind and give the other team the best nine innings … that we have. So it’s really going out and playing loose and loving the game that you’re playing.”

Johnson, who admitted that he is addicted to checking WarrenNolan.com daily for the latest RPI fluctuations, quickly moved a couple of Arizona’s home games to the road to help the team’s RPI opportunities as it looked to return to the NCAA regionals.

The Wildcats then surpassed their 2015 win total by mid May, but he still felt they weren’t playing to their full potential.

After dropping the first two games of a series at Oregon on May 20-21 and having lost four of their last five at that point, Johnson challenged the team during the finale of that series.

“We weren’t playing our best baseball Friday and Saturday and coach got us together Sunday in the dugout, I believe after the first inning and said, ‘You know, you guys are a lot better than you’re playing. You guys know that, I know that. We’re going to go out with a bang, get hot at the right time and ride this thing as long as we can,’” Gibbons said. “And I feel like that’s why we’re here. We kind of believe in ourselves and believe in one another. … I feel like that was the turning point.”

Arizona won that game with Oregon, 5-4, and is 16-2 since that point – while not only making it back to the NCAA postseason, but going on the road to win a regional at Louisiana-Lafayette and a super regional at Mississippi State leading up to its run this week in Omaha.

“In the outfield after the [Oregon finale] we talked about it, ‘We’re about ready to go off and we’re going to attack this thing this last week of the season and hopefully into the NCAA tournament,’” Johnson said. “And they’ve done that.”

This story was originally published June 26, 2016 at 9:23 PM with the headline "Wildcats on accelerated ascent in Johnson’s first season."