Beginning Saturday, Coastal Carolina will play LSU in the championship series of the Men's College World Series. (Reach out to the Arkansas fans in your life. They are not okay.)
It's an amazing opportunity for Coastal, as the program seeks to become the first non-Power 5 team to win a baseball national title since... Coastal Carolina won it in 2016. For a program that plays its home games in a 2,500-seat stadium and didn't appear on regular TV until the Super Regionals, to play in front of 25,000 fans in Omaha and millions more on ESPN, one would say it's a priceless opportunity, but Coastal Carolina spent $4 million to get to the MCWS Finals.
Simply getting to the MCWS Finals is great for the team, but being there is not enough for the program as a whole and the athletics department that supports it. It's a moment that must be capitalized upon. How do you turn these five or six games in Omaha into more NIL support, more athletics department donations, more undergraduate applications, more brand awareness, more everything?
There are entire volumes of literature that can be written on each of those subject, but the folks in the baseball program just needed a single sheet of paper to make the most of what they had, plus two strips of masking tape.
During Wednesday's semifinal win over Louisville, ESPN cameras delightfully zoomed in on this image, taped to the wall in the Chanticleers' dugout. It's a perfect mixture of new school -- a QR code! -- and old school. It cost approximately eight cents to produce, and required zero human manpower to execute.
Brilliant marketing. Just hang the QR code in the dugout! pic.twitter.com/l48ptoyt9U
— Brian Davis (@byBDavis) June 18, 2025
Did a single sheet of paper meaningfully transform Coastal's baseball program on its own? Of course not. Can I tell you exactly how many kiddos signed up for Coastal's baseball camps that wouldn't have gone otherwise? I can't. But I can tell you that sheet of paper was worth the effort it put to make and then some.
It's a reminder to us all that sometimes the most complex problems have the simplest solutions.