When Mike Sansing was hired at Kennesaw State in 1992, all he had was a baseball field. Not a baseball stadium, but a flat piece of ground. Two picnic tables and some hay bales were the seating.
Twenty-two years, an NAIA championship and a Division II championship later, Sansing has remained a loyal fixture, but everything else has changed. The team has a nice stadium and a facility with locker rooms and a weight room, for starters.
Sansing and the Owls (37-21) will take another step at noon Friday when they play in their first NCAA regional. They will open play against Alabama in Tallahassee, Fla.
“It’s been a goal for us,” he said. “It’s one we constantly talked about and worked for. We’ve gotten close the past couple of years. It’s exciting to get it done this year.”
The constant throughout the success has been Sansing, a coach with a dry sense of humor, a quick laugh and a sharp baseball mind.
To get a sense of how he manages his team and the reason for its success, it’s necessary to understand how he got to Kennesaw State.
After playing at West Georgia in 1982 and ’83, he worked as a graduate assistant there for two more years.
Eager to stay in baseball and not caring how much he was paid, he approached legendary Southern Poly coach Charlie Lumsden in 1987 about joining his staff as an assistant coach.
“I said we only have $5,000,” Lumsden said.
Sansing didn’t care. He told Lumsden he would get a job in a warehouse in the morning and coach in the afternoon.
And he did. Sansing worked for a company that shipped mopeds to different places in the United States. He would report for work in the morning, put in 5-6 hours, and then head to Southern Poly in the afternoon to finish an 11-12 hour workday.
“You don’t run across many young people like that,” Lumsden said. “I was really happy to have him.”
Sansing got his first head-coaching job at Shorter, where he stayed for three seasons and was 102-55 when the Owls came calling.
From that simple baseball field, he crafted a powerhouse. Under Sansing, the team has won an NAIA national championship (1994) and a Division II national championship (1996) and been runners-up twice.
In all, he is 882-451 at Kennesaw State. In the transient world of coaching, where one good season can result in a decent payday at a more prestigious school, Sansing has remained in northern Cobb County.
He hems and haws when asked how many chances he has had to leave. But it’s clear that he likes where he is. And while he has remained loyal to Kennesaw State, the university has remained loyal to him. He is the longest-tenured coach at the school.
Anything that another program could offer, he said Kennesaw State was planning to do or would do, such as the stadium and other facilities. So, why leave?
“We’ve been happy here,” he said. “They’ve treated us great. You couldn’t ask for a better area to be in for recruiting. The saying maybe the grass is greener isn’t true for me. Every job you take is for a lifetime, that’s the way I’ve looked at it.”
Just because he has stayed at Kennesaw State for a long time, don’t think his sentimentality extends to other things. He doesn’t drive a 20-year-old car or still use a flip phone. He’s not that sentimental.
And he hasn’t thrived at Kennesaw State by taking it easy. Ryan Coe, who played on the 1994 championship team and coached alongside Sansing for 13 years, says he has built the program on discipline and loyalty.
“He’s a bear, but a tough bear,” Coe said.
Coe said the loyalty Sansing has shown Kennesaw State extends to his players. He makes the least-talented player on the team feel as if he is the most-talented.
“Once you play for him, you realize how much he cares for the players,” Coe said. “You love your school, you love your team, you love your stats, but you want to play for the guy.”
That, more than the stadium or the facilities, may explain Sansing’s success at Kennesaw State.
“We didn’t have anything, but we made it,” he said.
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