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WVU Baseball HC Steve Sabins Ready to Carve His Own Path

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WVU Baseball Randy Mazey, Steve Sabins and Grant Hussey celebrating after win
Kelsie LeRose / WVSN

Even during the heights of former WVU Baseball head coach Randy Mazey’s storied Mountaineers’ career, it became clear that first year head coach Steve Sabins would end up calling the shots someday: former Mountaineers Victor Scott II and Jackson Wolf told WVSN in 2024 they could tell as far back as 2019 that Mazey earmarked Sabins as his successor.

Even as Mazey’s hand-picked successor, Sabins’ Monday, Feb. 3 press conference kicking off the 2025 season showed how the two longtime Mountaineers differ in approach. Sabins described himself as a Type A personality — characterized with traits like competitiveness, ambition, and a strong desire to succeed. Mazey undoubtedly possesses those qualities too, but Sabins said his longtime mentor approached the game with a tempered style… one that Sabins learned to incorporate into his own way of doing things.

“I used to always joke with Maze because […he] was pretty laid back and didn’t sweat the small stuff too much. I’m a little bit more of the organizer and the planner kind of stuff. I’d pull my hair out, and he would always say ‘never make a decision until you have to,’” Sabins said.

“I think about that quite a bit, just because there are so many decisions in this seat and you want to let some things unfold, as far as that’s whether that’s naming starters, picking staff members… whatever it is running the game, kinda gotta let some things unfold to get as much information as you can to make quality decisions… slow down on some decision-making and make sure you read the situation accurately.”

Trusting the Climb

How else do Mazey and Sabins differ? Starting point, for one. When Mazey took over, WVU Baseball hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament in close to two decades and faced the daunting task of adjusting to the Big 12 Conference. Now they’re fresh off the most successful regular season and postseason campaigns in program history, so Sabins has a chance to hit the ground running with a smooth transition. After spending the past nine seasons under Mazey’s guidance, Sabins described how he watched that climb take place.

“I think it’s momentum. That’s the name of our game. It’s recruiting momentum, it’s about season momentum, it’s about getting the right coaches in place, the right players in place. When I first got here, you were scrapping for momentum,” Sabins said, recalling how he would try to persuade recruits by saying that the team made — made, not won — the Big 12 Championship game the previous season… a far cry from their current standing, fresh off the first superregional appearance in team history.

“What’s the next step here?” Sabins said of his approach. “There’s so much left to be done if you’re looking at the big picture, so I think that’s what I focus on. It’s just, there’s so much more that can be done, so let’s go try to do it.”

Even with a new head coach, WVU Baseball enters 2025 picked to finish fourth in the Big 12’s preseason rankings.

“No One Knows if We’re Good or Not”

Sabins said he takes it as a compliment to the program’s success, but also knows how much work remains unfinished.

“Pretty much nobody knows if we’re good or not. We replaced half our team from last year with transfer portals and incoming players, so over 50 percent of our roster is new guys. And so it’s just a massively different team, we have a lot to prove,” Sabins said. “In the program we call it [the outside noise] poison because you’ve gotta be careful of what you ingest. If you fall in love with yourself, you get your ass kicked. If you look ahead, you get your ass kicked. If you get too worked up in what other people think, you end up getting your ass kicked. So just trying to stay the course, stay focused, get better, all those things that we talk about in our program all the time.”

Even with those lofty expectations — and on the heels of the best coach in program history — Sabins knows how to drown out the noise, substituting expectations he has for himself in maintaining a winning program.

WVU Baseball HC Steve Sabins Details New Role, Won’t ‘Cower in Fear’ of Expectations

“As far as pressure, not so much… I’ve been here now, this is my tenth year, so more proud. You create those expectations by winning and putting a quality product on the field,” Sabins said. “So if you can continue to do that, expectations will rise and so those expectations are really a privilege for us. We’re very lucky that people think that we can build competitive rosters here and play high quality baseball.”

WVU Baseball’s Personnel Changes

Last but not least, Sabins described how personnel changes will impact the way he coaches the Mountaineers. Modern athletic programs have far bigger staffs than teams of the past, diversifying approaches by making sure that there’s an expert on hand devoted to each aspect of the game.

“Probably the fact that I’ll do a little bit less on the field. Coach Mazey grew up in an era where he had done so much,” Sabins said, running through Mazey’s extensive resume of close to 40 years in Division 1 baseball as a coach and player.

“He had done everything on the field and so when he got here, coaching staffs were smaller, he really relied on his own experience and skills a ton because Coach Maze, he called pitches, he ran the offense, he made bullpen decisions, he really ran the game, and so this year probably the biggest difference is that Coach [Justin] Oney will call pitches, Coach [Christopher] Reilly will help with some decisions before the game as far as who’s available and who’s gonna pitch, I’ll run the offense, Coach [Jimmy] Roesinger will position the infielders, Coach [Drew] Hefner’s gonna help with preparation of some outfield stuff, Coach [Jacob] Garcia will do the scouting reports, so just a little bit more diverse when it comes to the coaching aspect of it, relying on some more people inside the organization… there’s more variation in the people that have an impact on the game.”

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