Ron Polk - Special Assistant to the Athletic Director - Staff Directory

Staff Directory

Ron Polk

Title:
Special Assistant to the Athletic Director

Considered by many to be the “Father of Southeastern Conference Baseball,” Ron Polk has just completed his 54^th year coaching college baseball with 51 of those years coaching at the NCAA-D1 level.

His resume includes 31 seasons as a head coach in the SEC, 1,373 wins, six Halls of Fame, seven tours as a coach with the USA National Baseball team, eight trips to the College World Series in Omaha with three different schools, and eight summers coaching in the prestigious Cape Cod Summer League in Massachusetts.

He has served as an assistant coach at The University of Arizona; The University of New Mexico, Miami-Dade Community College; The University of Miami, and the University of Alabama – Birmingham.

He was the head coach at Georgia Southern University for four years taking them to the College World Series in his second season. He served as the head coach at the University of Georgia for two seasons, also taking them to the College World Series. He is most famous for being the head coach at Mississippi State for 29 years, taking them to the College World Series six times.

Ron Polk is one of only three college baseball coaches to ever take three different schools to the NCAA College World Series in Omaha. In 1966, he was on the coaching staff at the University of Arizona that also made an appearance in Omaha. Thus, his teams have made an appearance in Omaha for five decades.

187 of his players as a head coach have signed professional baseball contracts with 29 of them having played in the major leagues. He has coached 35 All-Americans and 76 All-SEC players. In addition, he had had eight of his players drafted in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft.

In 31 of his 35 years as a head coach, his teams have been ranked in the NCAA Division I top-20 at some point in the season, with six of those teams finishing in the top six in the country. Four of his Mississippi State teams were ranked No. 1 in the country during parts of each season.

Polk was named the National Baseball Coach of the Year twice and the SEC Baseball Coach of the Year five times. Baseball America named him the sixth greatest baseball coach in college baseball history in 1999.

In his 35 years as an NCAA Division I baseball coach, he had only one losing season, and he is now the winningest coach in all sports (men and women) in Southeastern Conference History.

Polk is the former president of the American Baseball Coaches Association and the winner of the Lefty Gomez award, the highest award in this association. In 1987 he was named the State of Mississippi Sportsman of the Year and in 1987 he received the highest award given out by the State of Mississippi Athletic Hall of Fame – the “Rube” Award.

In 1997, and again on the new stadium in 2019, the baseball stadium on the campus of Mississippi State was named after him. Polk was named a SEC Legend in 2018.

He has served on the USA National Baseball coaching staff seven times, more than any other college baseball coach. He served as an assistant coach five times and the head coach twice. In both 1988 and 1996, he was on the coaching staff of the Olympic baseball teams (1988 in Seoul, South Korea, and 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia.)

In addition, he has spoken at hundreds of baseball clinics and camps all over the United States and took his Mississippi State team to play in both Germany and the Netherlands.

Polk wrote “The Book” on coaching baseball for players and coaches and as the author and publisher of The Baseball Playbook. It has been the leading teaching textbook used in over 450 college and university baseball coaching classes with a little over 125,000 books sold.

Coach Polk continues to coach college baseball players each summer in the Cape Cod League and also serves as the Special Assistant to the Athletic Director at Mississippi State.