Clemson head baseball coach Monte Lee says the football program’s national championship can be an inspiration to all the programs in the athletic department.
“We all have our goals and we all have our expectations,” Lee said in an exclusive interview with The Clemson Insider earlier this week. “We all have things we want to focus on and improve on a day in and day out basis as a team. I think when you see what happened with our football team, it only inspires us as coaches and as players to strive to reach our goals and expectations.”
Like the football program, Lee and his baseball program have high expectations, too. The Tigers are coming off the program’s first ACC Championship since 2006 and they are thinking about winning the conference again, as well contend for a trip to the College World Series.
Clemson, which finished with a 44-20 record in Lee’s first year as head coach, earned a No. 7 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament before losing to Oklahoma State in the Clemson Regional Finals. The Cowboys went on to advance to the CWS.
It was a heartbreaking way for the season to come to an end, especially after all the success the Tigers had in Lee’s first year. Lee says that is where they can learn from Dabo Swinney and the football program.
The football team fell just short of winning the national championship in 2015, but they used that heartbreak to drive them and motivate them to get back to the title game in 2016. And this time they finished the job by beating Alabama thanks to Deshaun Watson’s game-winning two-yard touchdown pass to Hunter Renfrow with one second left on the clock.
“If there is anything I can take away from the football team, it is just that inspiration of a program that has been on a mission ever since Coach Swinney got here to win a national championship,” Lee said. “It has been a process. The level of success they have had and in the way they have went about doing it, I think that is something that really resonates with Clemson fans. That resonates with the nation that follows college football and how Coach Swinney went about doing this.”
What Swinney did was change the culture in the football program, a culture that stands by its “Best is the Standard” motto in everything it does, whether it is in the weight room, the film room, meetings, the practice field, on game days or in the classroom. They always strive to be the best they can be.
“It is inspiring,” Lee said. “It is inspiring to us that are in the coaching profession and it is definitely inspiring to our student athletes to watch our guys win with class and to do it the right way. That’s the biggest message.”
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