The morning after the end of the college baseball season is always depressing for me.
Like the rest of Mississippi and this area, I’m also a college baseball freak, but this year’s season end is different.
It’s different because the baseball world has to say goodbye to Southern Miss coach Scott Berry. Although it doesn’t need to be said, he is one of the good guys.
In my years on the job, Berry has been one of the most humble coaches I have ever encountered. If you met the guy in passing, you would never know that he led one of the most successful mid-major baseball programs in the country. His accolades include seven straight NCAA tournament appearances, two super regionals, and 10 conference titles, along with 528 wins to make him the winningest coach in USM’s program history.
I remember the first time I met Berry. I was in my second semester of college in the spring of 2017. My boss at the Student Printz called me at the last minute and gave me an address to be at for 1 p.m.
I told him I had class, and he quickly told me to skip it. The address was to Pete Taylor Park, and it was the baseball team’s media day, but I only found that out when I blindly followed my old boss to the press box. I knew Southern Miss had a good team, but in terms of names and faces, I was clueless.
After a few minutes of talking amongst reporters, a man wearing jeans, a blazer, and boots came walking in – my initial impression was that this has to be Mississippi baseball at its finest. To a certain extent, I was right. As Berry happily fielded what seemed like an endless 20-minute session of questions from reporters, my thought on him was that he seemed like an intimidating countryman, good ole boy. But as the 2017 season played out, I soon learned what he was really about.
About three years later, just after I left my first job in Iowa and returned to Hattiesburg in 2020 to work at my current gig, one of my first duties was coincidentally USM baseball’s media day. As a student reporter, you don’t know how seriously coaches really look at you, so I didn’t expect anything but just for it to be another day on the job. But as Berry walked in, one of his first orders of business was to shake my hand and say, “I see you made it back just in time. Glad to have you back.”
That season, as we all know, was cut short by COVID, but that’s a memory that will stick with me forever.
However, my favorite Berry story is from last season, just at the beginning of 2022. At the time, I lived in apartments right next to the Pete (not the ones they hit foul balls in). I could always hear practice and the sound of baseballs; to me, that’s like hearing birds chirp.
Now Berry has perhaps a bigger passion than baseball, and that’s hunting, particularly turkey hunting. One morning, the week before the season began, I saw a pair of turkeys near the Longleaf Trace right by my apartment. It was a jake and a hen, I later learned.
My natural instinct was to tell Berry, and so I did after USM swept North Alabama in the opening weekend. Normally, I’m the one asking him questions, but the roles reversed as I received the mix of an interview and interrogation based on his enthusiasm for the idea that turkeys were near his baseball field.
About two weeks later, during what had to be baseball practice, based on the sound I could hear from the stadium, I received a text message from Berry. It was a video of one of the turkeys. Berry had driven his truck around the nearby neighborhood and found it by using his own turkey call. The video was him gobbling at the turkey, who gobbled right back.
I could give more Berry stories, some of which I doubt he remembers, but my two small stories, I think, are the perfect illustrations of describing who he is. He’s a guy that cares about the impact he leaves on people, and he does it so naturally that I don’t think he realizes when he does it anymore. In the same sense, Scott Berry is a man that never allowed his success and failures to dictate the person he is, and that’s a rare trait in coaching, much less for anybody to really have.
Follow Abadie on Twitter: @PineBeltSPORTS or @AndrewAbadie.
