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Kentucky baseball coach Nick Mingione said recruiting and evaluating are “two different things,” especially when it comes to the transfer portal.
“The evaluation piece you have to nail it. That’s where it starts. And then the recruiting starts. But if you don’t evaluate right, it’s going to be hard for you,” Mingione said before UK played in its second straight NCAA super regional.
“I have a series of questions that I ask kids and their families to try to dig up as much information as I can get. One bad miss on an evaluation can really change. It’s a tricky piece, but we have a series of questions. I have a lot of weaknesses. (My wife) Christen has told me that one of my gifts is my intuition on people. I don’t take credit for that. I’ll give the Lord credit for that.
“But I want to just build this team, and we’ve got to continue to evaluate right out of the portal because there’s a lot of really good players.”
Mingione still wants the “foundation” of his recruiting to be high school players but recruiting also has to factor in the transfer portal as well as players who might leave for professional playing careers.
“I’m really proud of our program because the fewest players go into the portal as any team in our league. I think that says a lot about them,” Mingione said. “When you’re dealing with graduation, draft, and the portal allows you — one of the things we wanted to do was be old. And we believe if we continue to develop our high school student-athletes and then we were able to mix and match and get some guys out of the portal, that would be a good recipe and formula.”
Mingione was an assistant coach at Kentucky under John Cohen for two seasons and UK won its first SEC championship in 2006. Kentucky didn’t win the NCAA regional but it did get to host a regional.
“I always remember John talking about how we had to have edge and toughness. And we wanted to be old. At that time we did have a lot of junior college players. If you think about all the great junior college players that came through our program, those guys were all part of us trying to be old as well.
“So the fact we’ve been able to do that and develop our guys and the guys have been patient, and to mix in the portal, that’s been one of the adjustments we learned and we decided over COVID.”
