WVU baseball coach Steve Sabins takes questions at the podium during a press conference Friday in Morgantown. (Photo by Greg Hunter/Blue & Gold News)

MORGANTOWN — West Virginia held an introductory press conference Friday morning for Steve Sabins, its new head baseball coach, but in many ways it was something of a superfluous exercise in that it was introducing a man who had just finished his ninth season as an assistant to the retiring Randy Mazey.

What’s more, the last year of that had been as “coach in waiting,” having passed up a chance at a head coaching job in Cincinnati last year to inherit the rising Mountaineer program from the popular Mazey.

Randy Mazey, of course, had become the face of WVU baseball as he took the team from Hawley Field to a Super Regional this year, a friendly, down-to-earth father figure who ingrained his persona and his family into the community.

Each step along the way, however, Sabins was by his side and while mostly he hovered within the large shadow Mazey cast over the Mountaineers’ rise to prominence, he was part of it each step of the way, watching, learning and analyzing as his duties and responsibilities increased to the point that the order of succession was able to go without a hitch.

And here he was in the baseball facility at the Kendrick Family Ballpark, his wife and two young children along with him, laying out his plans to move the program forward, properly thankful for the way it had been handled and paying homage to Mazey’s leadership.

Much, he noted, would remain the same but he said he was his own man and had his own ideas and would make changes where he felt they were necessary.

And maybe the window into his makeup was thrown open when he was asked about the kind of staff he hoped to assemble and the kind of players he was looking to recruit. That adjective he leaned upon in describing his view of what he wanted as players and coaches was “bad***.”

Now, he wasn’t speaking of Bear Bryant “bad***” coaches or Jack Lambert “bad***” players, but he had in mind a personality trait that made them disciplined, tough and determined.

“I think my role and responsibility as a head coach is to bring the most bad ass staff and players in the world to the door and let them do their thing,” he said.

Obviously that screamed out for an explanation of why he felt that way. It was what he looked for when he went out recruiting as WVU’s recruiting director.

“The reason I put so much value in that is because I know that people are the only thing that matters,” he said. “I think it’s important to know the kids’ stories before they get here because you have a chance to make a bigger impact in their lives if I know where they came from. ”

It was noted that it’s important at this press conference that we all learn what makes him go and what athletic director Wren Baker and Mazey saw in him to make the rather unorthodox move.

Sabins is a baseball junkie, through and through.

He was born in Dallas/Fort Worth, grew up in Austin.

He played junior high football, some ice hockey and roller hockey in high school but he was bitten by the baseball bug and chased that dream, something that turned into an upriver swim.

He played at four universities, he pointed out, a rather rare bio in the pre-transfer portal era.

“I was a revolutionary,” he joked. “The rules were different, you could change levels and play right away.”

And change he did. He played at a junior college in Texas, transferred after summer baseball to another juco in Florida, played well and got an opportunity to go to Oklahoma State. While there he wound up having a medical redshirt for a year before.

“It didn’t look like it was in my cards the following year, so I transferred to Embry-Riddle in Florida and finished out there,” he said. “I was old to start college, so I was about 24 when I got through and that was before COVID and redshirts and all that.

He’d been “chasing the dream”, as he put it, but knew he wasn’t going to make it professionally as a player.

“I handled it fairly well. I know I didn’t want to work in an office and I wanted to be around young people and I wanted to stay around the game,” Sabins said. “So, I got an opportunity to coach in a summer collegiate league. I drove 90 minutes a day, made $400 for summer, so I lost a ton of money on gas but I got to be around the game.”

Oklahoma State coach Frank Anderson brought him back as a graduate coach.

“I started cleaning dugouts and painting walls, was in charge of the work/study program. That was my beginning,” he said. “It meant everything to me. I had to stay in the game. I was so lucky to get the opportunity at the Division I level at Oklahoma State.”

He wound up earning a master’s degree, stayed in Stillwater until Mazey came and hired him away as the youngest Power 5 assistant coach nine years ago.

It was an eye-opening experience.

“I learned to love it over the years here. Like I said, when Coach Mazey gave me the job, I’d never recruited. I was dropped in West Virginia, no tags, no regional ties. It was kind of like ‘Good luck.’ I didn’t know Pennsylvania from Ohio or Virginia. It was all the same to me,” he said.

As the years went by, his family grew and Morgantown came to be more than a career stop but a home. His two children were born at Ruby Memorial Hospital.

“Coming to Morgantown was the first time I had that sense of the community; to know the banker and the real estate agent and you know the people at the grocery store and you start to really know the people who have passion at this university,” he said.

Now he has his own baseball team, a team that is on the upswing but that loses Wetherholt and Clark, so there’s plenty of challenge ahead as goes out and looks to add some “bad***” players and coaches to get the job done.