Father of WVU baseball’s modern era bids farewell

The writing was painted on the dugout wall all year, but that does not make the season’s conclusion any easier for Randy Mazey and the West Virginia University baseball community.

The Mountaineers were rolling.

They went unbeaten in an NCAA Tournament Regional for the first time in 129 seasons. They clinched their first Super Regional in the process. A year after the program’s first Big 12 Championship, Mazey’s team leaped over obstacles it previously could not conquer.

Then, over a 30-hour span, that momentum slowly disintegrated, and the flames of a storybook season — and the most important chapter of WVU baseball history — burnt out with two gut-wrenching losses to North Carolina in the Chapel Hill Super Regional .

“In 35 years of coaching, that’s the team I [wanted] to end my career with,” Mazey said. “The guys that were in that huddle, I love every one of them, and I think they know that.”

The skipper’s looming retirement was the focal point of the 2024 baseball season right from the moment his departure and the scheduled promotion of his longtime assistant Steve Sabins was announced last summer . That was the case even with a potential top-five MLB Draft prospect, JJ Wetherholt, on the roster. The conversation dominated WVU’s preseason previews, and the topic came up in nearly every interview with the now-58-year-old ball coach over the last year.

He cried. A lot. Nobody blamed him.

“I’m an emotional guy,” he said.

Saturday’s Super Regional loss wrapped up a formerly impressive, now iconic, head coaching career for Mazey after 12 seasons at WVU, 17 seasons as a head coach and 34 years in college baseball. In Morgantown, he recorded the third-most wins for a head coach in program history with his 372-274 record.

When he arrived in 2013, the Mountaineers were considered a non-contender and dead weight compared to their new conference counterparts in the Big 12. WVU had not made the NCAA Tournament in 17 years and had never won a Regional upon his hiring. Its stadium also paled in comparison to those of the Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas-based schools in the conference.

Year-by-year, he found a knack for hitting program checkpoints that seemed unreasonably far away less than a decade earlier. WVU finally made it back to the NCAA Tournament in 2017 in his fifth season, which was the Mountaineers’ second full season in their shiny new ballpark . Then, they hosted a regional in 2019, won a Big 12 regular season title in 2023 and eventually, in his last season this spring, finally took home NCAA hardware with a 3-0 performance in the 2024 Tucson Regional.

Mazey has been an underdog plenty of times in his life, but it was during this stretch he started to embrace being undervalued, and his teams took on that identity by continuously punching upwards.

“These 12 years have been unbelievable,” he said. “I told the guys going into the season [to not] try and put statistical goals on yourself. Don’t try to hit .300 or win 10 games [on the mound]. Your goal every year should be to exceed expectations, and we’ve done that.”

As a result, over thirty of Mazey’s players from WVU have been selected in the MLB Draft, and that number will only increase in the coming years.

The lingering smoke of the extinguished flame that is Mazey’s career will still be noticeable in the near future. Sabins recruited on his behalf for the greater part of the last decade, so the skipper’s influence will undoubtedly shine through his protégé. Fans will continue tirelessly campaigning for his statue outside Kendrick Family Ballpark. His son Weston is also committed to join Sabins’ 2026 team.

But most importantly for Mazey, he plans on continuing his mission of uniting the WVU baseball program with the greater West Virginia community.

“That’s been the secret sauce,” he said. “It’s been the people.”

How exactly will he stay connected to the program? That is still to be determined. For now, if you approach him on the streets of Morgantown about what he’ll do in retirement, he will crack a joke and ask for your name, and he will probably remember it, too .

As for baseball advice, the message remains the same for anyone who asks.

“Love your kids whether they get hits or not,” he said. “It’s important to them to know that the people in their lives love them more as people than as players.”

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