Lawson, Mingione Ready for 2025 Campaigns to Begin
The Kentucky baseball and softball teams held their annual media day on Tuesday. Both UK Baseball head coach Nick Mingione and UK Softball head coach Rachel Lawson are optimistic ahead of their 2025 campaigns.
Mingione and the baseball Cats are coming off the program’s first appearance in the College World Series. Mingione knows there’s only one thing now that his program has not done.
“Now the next step is to win it,” Mingione said. “That would be the next thing, that’s the next thing to knock down. Over eight years, we’ve been to three super regionals. It’s good to make it but that wall has been knocked down and now, we’ve got to win the whole thing. One wall knocked down, another one to go.”
The Cats have 29 new players among the 44-man roster and there has been a definite learning curve.
“We had a super competitive fall, guys fighting for a lot of spots,” Mingione said. “I do love their competitive spirit and we spent a lot of time teaching them how to win. Those are the two phases that every team must go through. Number one, they have to learn how to compete and number two, they have to learn how to win and we spent a lot of time teaching them how to do those two things.”
Mingione believes that he and his staff have been able to build a winning culture over the last three years, something that has helped the Cats win a lot more games on the field.
“We’ve had success the last three years, the last two seasons (have been) record-breaking seasons for really three reasons – talent, people and culture,” Mingione said. “When I say talent, it starts with talented players and I’ve hired a super-talented staff. As far as people go, we have identified the right people that not only want to make themselves better players but more importantly, they want to help Kentucky win. Culture has been really big.”
After finishing 31-24 last season and falling short of the NCAA Super Regionals for the third consecutive season, Lawson rebuilt her roster. Using both high school recruits and transfers, Lawson assembled a nearly all new squad.
“You’re going to look at a completely new team this year,” Lawson said. “We’re kind of the ‘new look’ Wildcats. Years and years ago, someone told me that if you want to change, you have to change the people. They meant getting all new people, and I do agree that you need to be able to plug where you’re not getting it done and also just new energy from the outside. But I also think that current returners can change their mindset. I believe we have done both things with this team.”
Gone from last year’s team is All-American shortstop Erin Coffel, who was a mainstay in the UK lineup for four years. Absorbing the loss of such a productive player can be tough, but Lawson believes her 2025 squad is built to be able to do that.
“Erin was always around and she was always improving herself. One of the opposite sides of having an Erin Coffel was that everyone expected Erin was going to come up with the big hit to get it done,” Lawson said. “I would say this year, we have a much better team concept and we definitely have more power throughout the entire order. We’re not just relying on one person to get it done. I feel really good about the team part of this.”
Despite the number of new faces on this year’s roster, Lawson feels good about where the Cats are as the season begins on Friday.
“I think this team is actually going to be better than last year’s team,” Lawson said. “I actually think this team is going to be very good and somebody’s going to be surprised. Either I’m going to be very surprised, and that rarely happens, or the rest of the country is going to be very surprised. In order for us to go to Oklahoma City, we’re going to have to get better at communication, our players are going to have to get better at defense and we have to get better at playing as a team.”
Both the baseball and softball programs are looking forward to the 2025 season, with postseason success on the minds of both head coaches.
