LSU coach Paul Mainieri has taken the baseball team back into the spotlight since arriving on campus in 2006 with a national championship and numerous All-American and All-Southeastern Conference performers.But the splash his student-athletes are making in the classroom has him just as excited.He takes such great pride in his graduating seniors that the team held a special ceremony for six members of the team in their hotel in Starkville, Miss., before a game against Mississippi State, since the day of graduation fell during the road trip.Former Tiger Nicholas Pontiff said Mainieri did the same thing at Notre Dame for the graduating seniors if they were on a road trip. He added that Becca Hubbard, associate director in the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student-Athletes and the baseball team’s academic advisor, gets a lot of credit for heading the ceremony.Hubbard said from an academic standpoint, that day was her Omaha.”It’s tough for anyone to earn a college diploma, but for a student-athlete, it can be tricky,” Hubbard said. “When you are ranked No. 1 in the country and you have a brand new stadium and there are all these expectations, it’s even more exciting when they get to that point where you can be the best athletically and the best academically.”Mainieri had a lot of pressure coming into LSU, and he inherited an Academic Progress Rate from former coach Smoke Laval that had the Tigers in academic probation.APR judges a program’s ability to keep a player academically eligible and enrolled in school each semester until they graduate.In 2006, Laval’s last season, LSU had an APR rate of 867 and a historical rate (a combination of the past four APR rates) of 905, meaning the program was under the 925 mark and thus on probation.If a program goes below 900, then it runs the risk of postseason ban and a 10 percent cut in practices and games. But, if a school loses a player to the pro draft, the program isn’t penalized as long as the player was eligible at the end of the spring semesterThe rate has risen since Mainieri’s entrance as coach. LSU got above 1,000 last season thanks to two former players — Jonathan Wilhite and Brett Sager — coming back and graduating.LSU had a historical rate of 922 heading into this season. It will move up to a 938 historical after this season with a 982 for the season according to Mainieri’s calculations, moving LSU out of probation, although that will not be official until two weeks into the fall semester.Once Mainieri finishes up next year, four years will have passed since he arrived, so the historical APR rate for LSU will be his own and won’t include Laval’s rates. The rate will be well above the 950 mark if the trend continues for Mainieri.Mainieri graduated 71 of 71 seniors at Notre Dame in his 12 seasons as head coach there. He also graduated 11 of the 12 juniors who left for the major leagues. The only junior that hasn’t graduated is closer Brad Lidge, who Mainieri said is 12 hours of credit from graduating.”He cares more about what kind of person you are going to be when you leave the program,” Pontiff said. “You may be great or average, but your career is going to come to an end eventually. He instills in us that if you get the degree, it opens doors in life.”In addition to APR, each program also has a Graduation Success Rate, which measures graduation rates at Division-I institutions and includes students transferring away from the institutions, according to the NCAA’s Web site. The GSR also allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.LSU’s baseball GSR in 2008 was a 45 percent while the SEC average was 64.3 percent and the national average was 68 percent. In 2007, LSU had a GSR of 44 percent.Hubbard, who has worked with the team since January 2008, handles anything academic that comes up with the players. She said this rate isn’t quite as telling as the APR, so they don’t focus on it as much.”Although this rate is important, it doesn’t reflect the good work that the student-athletes are doing,” Hubbard said. “At a program like LSU, we have quite a few students who have the opportunity to play professional baseball and who do not have the opportunity to come back and finish their degrees immediately.”While LSU’s rising APR and GSR have Mainieri and Hubbard happy, one growing academic trend does have Mainieri concerned — the lack of a college degree among professional players.A recent study by the Wall Street Journal found that 26 of the 1,042, or roughly 2.5 percent, current major league players and managers have college degrees. Two of those 26 are Mainieri’s former players — Jeff Samardzija and Aaron Heilman.Mainieri said the number doesn’t surprise him. The main reason for this, he said, may have to do with the growing number of foreign-born players entering the league and the number of players who jump straight to minor league ball without ever stepping foot on a college campus.However, with high school prospects such as Bryce Harper, who has chosen to forego his final two years of high school to enter a junior college and then get selected in next year’s draft, the low number of college degrees may continue.There are even a few cases of high school kids skipping their senior season to graduate early and join a college program a year early to be draft eligible a year earlier than normal.”I’m kind of split on my feeling on that because you hate to see kids hurry through life,” Mainieri said. “But at the same time, if they gave up their senior year and enrolled in college in January, it keeps them from signing out of high school … it allows them to be eligible for the draft at a younger age … and going to college will help them with their development.”
—-Contact Andy Schwehm at [email protected]