![\"LSU](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/SkipBertman3_LSUAthletics.jpg\" "\\"SkipBertman3_LSUAthletics\\"\/")
\nFormer LSU baseball coach Skip Bertman was 870-330-3 with the Tigers from 1984-2001 and won five national championship from 1991-2000 with 11 trips to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, in all. Present LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson (right) idolized him from a young age. (LSU photo).<\/p>\n
By GLENN GUILBEAU<\/p>\n
Tiger Rag Editor<\/p>\n
Skip Bertman, who made college baseball a happening in Baton Rouge and built its brand nationally perhaps more than anyone else, died early Friday morning after being hospitalized with heart issues.<\/p>\n
Bertman was 88.<\/p>\n
A native of Detroit who grew up in Miami, Bertman left the Miami Hurricanes associate head coach\/pitching coach position a year after the Hurricanes won the 1982 national championship to take over an LSU baseball program in the summer of 1983 that had never sniffed Omaha, Nebraska, and the College World Series. In fact, LSU had not made the NCAA postseason since 1975 when it last won the Southeastern Conference and had eight losing seasons between 1965 and 1981.<\/p>\n
Within just eight years of the Bertman Method, LSU\u2019s fan base basically owned Omaha \u2013 before, during and long after games as the Tigers reached the CWS in Bertman\u2019s third season in 1986, again in 1987, 1989, 1990 and won it all in 1991 as Bertman began to take over college baseball in attendance and championships.<\/p>\n
From 1991 through 2000, Bertman won five national championships \u2013 1991, \u201993, \u201996, \u201997 and 2000 before retiring after the 2001 season and becoming LSU\u2019s athletic director for eight years. In all, he took the Tigers and the LSU Nation to the Promised Land in Omaha 11 times.<\/p>\n
He retired with an NCAA best 20-2 record (.909 percent) on championship day of NCAA Regionals, Super Regionals and national championship games. The NCAA didn\u2019t move to best-of-three national title series in Omaha until 2003. Bertman was also 90-31 in NCAA postseason play for a .743 winning percentage \u2013 also an NCAA record when he retired.<\/p>\n
\u201cI look at this man, and I see the John Wooden of college baseball,\u201d Jay Johnson said the day he was announced as LSU\u2019s new baseball coach on June 28, 2021, inside Alex Box Stadium with Bertman in the audience \u2013 as he usually was for the three coaches who followed him.<\/p>\n
Wooden won 10 national championship in college basketball at UCLA from 1964-75.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the greatest college baseball coach of my entire lifetime,\u201d Johnson continued. \u201cFive national championships in a 10-year period is legendary.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was in 2001 when Johnson was a 24-year-old assistant coach at Division II Point Loma Nazarene in San Diego that he bought \u201cMotivation and Teamwork: Winning The Big One,\u201d a video by Bertman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t tell you how influential that was in my development as a coach,\u201d Johnson said, looking at Bertman during that press conference. \u201cI used your speeches and your motivational sheets and all these things you utilized to motivate your players to do amazing things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bertman\u2019s most famous tale is the \u201cHold The Rope\u201d story, which is the name of an \u201cSEC Storied\u201d documentary on Bertman that premiered in 2021 \u2013 just weeks before LSU athletic director Scott Woodward hired Johnson from Arizona to replace retiring coach Paul Mainieri. As athletic director after the 2006 baseball season, Bertman hired Mainieri, who won the Tigers\u2019 sixth national title in 2009 with Bertman watching. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Johnson would go on to win the 2023 national championship with Bertman on the field after the game and the 2025 title with Bertman in the Tigers\u2019 locker room before the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe \u2018Hold The Rope\u2019 story was told to me in a small town in California 20 years ago,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cAnd I believe that was the start of my journey to here. So, coach, thank you, for showing me exactly how this is to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along the way, Bertman also won six consecutive national championships in attendance from 1996 through 2001 at the original Alex Box Stadium, which Bertman kept building on annually like it was an Erector Set. But to LSU fans, it may as well have been the Colosseum\u00a0in Rome.<\/p>\n
LSU never lost an elimination game with Omaha on the line under Bertman through 10 NCAA Regionals in the Box in 1986, 1990, \u201991, \u201992, \u201993, \u201994, \u201995, \u201996, \u201997 and \u201998. In 2000 and \u201901, Bertman kept that streak alive. He didn\u2019t reach Omaha from the Box in 1992 and \u201995, but he didn\u2019t lose final round games with the CWS at stake. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the best college atmosphere I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d then-Tennessee coach Rod Delmonico said during a three-game series that LSU swept in 1998. \u201cThey\u2019ve got an Omaha crowd, except all of the fans are behind them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bertman also advanced to Omaha in 1989 from College Station, Texas, where his Tigers beat No. 1 Texas A&M (58-5) at home in back-to-back games, 13-5 and 5-4. LSU previously reached Omaha out of an NCAA Regional at the University of New Orleans in 1987.<\/p>\n
Bertman also won seven Southeastern Conference championships in 1986, 1990, \u201991, \u201992, \u201993, \u201996 and \u201997. Before him, LSU won just five SEC titles.<\/p>\n
And he turned LSU into a virtual Major League Baseball farm club with 40 who played for him reaching the Big Show. During his last season in 2001 alone, there were 16 in MLB that season. That included Pittsburgh second baseman Warren Morris. His walk-off home run that beat Bertman\u2019s former school and alma mater, Miami, 9-8, in the 1996 national championship game with two outs and one on in the bottom of the ninth became the signature moment of the Bertman Era and college baseball overall.<\/p>\n
The late Billy Cannon, whose 89-yard punt return on Halloween Night 1959 for No. 1 LSU beat No. 3 Ole Miss, 7-3, and won him the school\u2019s first Heisman Trophy, said it was the moment of LSU sports, period. He told Morris his home run was bigger than his punt return when they met at Tiger Stadium in 2019 while Cannon was being honored on the 60th anniversary of the return.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause yours won the national championship,\u201d Cannon told Morris.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe may win the national championship again,\u201d Bertman said after what was his third title in six years. \u201cBut we\u2019ll never do it like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
And nobody did it quite like Bertman, who was a disciplined, exacting taskmaster, but who often had as much fun as his players.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can remember him saying, \u2018We want pressure. We invite it,\u2019 Morris said in his foreword to Bertman\u2019s biography \u2013 \u201cEverything Matters In Baseball: The Skip Bertman Story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morris wrote that Bertman often told his players, \u201cBe the star of your own movie. He had a great quote he repeated, \u2018Anything you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon, must, absolutely must come to pass.’\u201d <\/p>\n
That happened for Morris.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was one of the lucky ones to have been able to learn from one of the greatest leaders,\u201d Morris wrote. \u201cI tell people today, as a player at LSU under coach Bertman, you received more than just an education in baseball. You got an education in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bertman won as an athletic director at LSU, hiring four coaches who went on to win national championships. Late in the 2004 football season, he hired Les Miles to replace Nick Saban, who had left to coach the Miami Dolphins. Miles won the national championship in his third season in 2007. He hired Mainieri after the 2006 season, and Mainieri won the national title in his third season in 2009 and made the national championship series in 2017.<\/p>\n
He promoted assistant track coach Dennis Shaver to head coach when Pat Henry left for Texas A&M after the 2003 seasons. Shaver won the NCAA women\u2019s outdoor national title in 2008 and the men\u2019s outdoor crown in 2021. Bertman hired Chuck Winstead as golf coach in 2006, and he won the 2015 national championship.<\/p>\n
Under pressure to fire LSU basketball coach John Brady at times, Bertman didn\u2019t pull the trigger, instead advised him to schedule tougher opponents and stuck with him. And Brady took LSU to the Final Four in 2006 for the first time in 20 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cSkip\u2019s era \u2013 it was the greatest era of LSU athletics so far,\u201d current LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry said while he was deputy athletic director under Woodward. \u201cNothing better \u2013 two football championships (2003, 2007), Final Four in men\u2019s basketball (2006), five Final Fours in women\u2019s basketball (2004, \u201905, \u201906, \u201907, \u201908 before Kim Mulkey\u2019s national title in 2023), women\u2019s and men\u2019s track national championships (2008, \u201921). Baseball and softball went to the World Series.<\/p>\n
\u201cSkip was always more than a baseball coach,\u201d friend and LSU Board of Supervisors member Stanley Jacobs at the time Bertman retired as athletic director in 2008. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you hire smart people like Skip,\u201d they\u2019re adaptable,\u201d Woodward said shortly after becoming LSU athletic director in 2019. \u201cAnd if you have someone who really has savvy and understands what they\u2019re doing like Skip, and then they hire smart people around them \u2013 that\u2019s the key to success.\u201d<\/p>\n
But first and foremost, Bertman was a baseball coach, always two or three innings ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cSkip has elephant brain,\u201d said outfielder Rich Cordani, who was on the first national title team in 1991. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t get anything past him. Not that you wanted to. He would always be ahead mentally, situationally. He was our dad, and we were his sons. He was it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former LSU baseball coach Skip Bertman was 870-330-3 with the Tigers from 1984-2001 and won five national championship…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":778420,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2290],"tags":[22366,5,3318,4694,3619,13353,3315,84536],"class_list":["post-778419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-baseball","tag-alex-box-stadium","tag-baseball","tag-college-world-series","tag-jay-johnson","tag-lsu","tag-lsu-baseball","tag-omaha","tag-skip-bertman"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117093355232465085","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}