Mitch Thompson, The Man Who Will Bring Baylor Baseball Back to Prominence
“I’ve never had to work a day in my life,” Mitch Thompson often tells people. More so now than ever, that feeling persists as Thompson was named the 20th head baseball coach at Baylor University in early June, calling it his ‘dream job.’
When he’s not meticulously writing on his notepad at practice or on the phone with a recruit, Mitch loves to coach and teach others. His genuine and honest nature makes him beloved by his players and adored by his family.
“He is a baseball coach at all times. That is just who he is as a person. It’s ingrained in him,” says Mary Conley, Mitch’s oldest daughter.
Since the eighth grade, Mitch Thompson knew he wanted to be a college baseball coach, and if that didn’t work out, he wanted to coach football.
Mitch was born in Goodland, Kansas, a farming community of just under 5,000 people smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Goodland was a town so small that the local high school didn’t even field a baseball team.
Instead of falling in love with baseball the conventional way, Mitch spent his youth playing in American Legion leagues and traveling over seven hours to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to attend baseball camps at Oral Roberts University.
At Oral Roberts, Mitch met one of his lifelong mentors, Pat Harrison. Harrison, an assistant coach at ORU, inspired him to get into coaching. But in order to become a college baseball coach, Mitch had to gain experience playing at the college level first and foremost.
Out of high school, Mitch made stops at Cloud County Community College and Bacone College before finally settling two hours east of his hometown at Fort Hays State, where he’d go on to spend the final three years of his playing career.
“I wasn’t an exceptionally good player,” Mitch said. “With my experience level, I always felt I was a year behind from where I needed to be. When I went to junior college, I felt like, ‘Gosh, if I could go back and play American Legion ball again, I would be great.’ I always felt like I was chasing it.”
Once his playing days ran out in 1989, Coach Harrison helped Mitch send out his resume to over 40 college baseball coaches across the country with whom Harrison had developed a relationship with over the years.
Two days later, Ron Polk, the legendary head coach of Mississippi State and proclaimed “Father of SEC baseball,” gave Mitch a call. Mitch recalled Polk saying, “If you are good enough for Pat Harrison, you are good enough for us. We’d love to have you next year as a graduate assistant.”
“I was blown away,” Mitch said. “If I could have picked one college in America at the time to be a graduate assistant, it would have been Mississippi State. It was the Cadillac of college baseball. Ron Polk was on the cutting edge. He was on ESPN back in the day when nobody else was. To get that chance to start there with Coach Polk was unbelievable.”
Prior to the 1993 season, the NCAA ruled that only the head coach and two assistants could be compensated, and at the time, Mitch was the third assistant at Mississippi State. Not only was Mitch considered a volunteer, but he also could not travel with the team.
Mitch then left Starkville and took one of three paid positions under Hal Baird at Auburn University for a year before getting a call from a friend and former MSU assistant, Steve Smith.
“We took the job at Baylor,” Mitch recalls Smith telling him over the phone.
“Well, congrats, good for you and Melinda. I am really excited for y’all,” Mitch responded.
“No, you don’t understand. We took the job at Baylor,” Smith reiterated.
Once Mitch understood what Smith was implying, he was sold on the idea of coming to Texas and accepted the position as an assistant coach at Baylor University.
“I knew it was the next step,” Mitch said. “You’re just fighting and clawing trying to make a living … Then I’m the volunteer, and then I’m making $16,000 a year as a restricted earnings coach at Auburn, so to come here and make $30,000, it was a slam dunk. I finally got a job that I can at least make a little bit of a living on.”
During his first stint at Baylor from 1995 to 2012, Mitch helped guide 13 teams to the NCAA Tournament and 10 of those teams to 40-win seasons. Mitch also helped develop 97 all-conference players, 16 All-Americans and 72 players who were drafted or signed by Major League organizations.
“I remember in ‘05, the dogpile, no question, and winning it right here in front of our fans and going to Omaha,” Mitch said. “The big comeback against Tulane in the College World Series. Who can forget that? They are the No. 1 ranked team in the country, and we’re down 7-0 in the bottom of the seventh inning, and we come back and beat them 8-7.”
Despite all of the accolades, all of the wins, all of the success, “the main thing I remember is just the players,” Mitch said.
Mitch’s recruiting prowess and ability to bring in players such as David Murphy, Jason Jennings and Kip Wells, amongst many others, was one of the major factors in Baylor’s on-the-field success from the day Thompson joined the staff in 1995.
“Out of everything that he does as a baseball coach, recruiting is his passion … that’s what he loves to do,” Amber Thompson, Mitch’s wife of 29 years, said.
Mitch’s unique eye for talent is arguably one of his greatest strengths, according to his former players and those closest to him.
“Mitch has a knack for picking out not just the ones that look good on paper, but the ones who have the heart and the toughness and the grit that you need to win at the college baseball level,” Jason Jennings, former Baylor All-American, said.
When former Baylor great David Murphy was being recruited out of high school, Mitch gave Murphy the sense of trust that he was looking for in a college.
“Everybody was telling me I was going to fit in with their program. Everybody was telling me I was going to have a great opportunity to play as a freshman,” Murphy said. “But there was something unspoken that stood out with the Baylor coaching staff that their word was going to hold up a lot better than that same word I was hearing at other schools.”
A typical recruiting pitch from Mitch always includes him going over the three most important decisions in a person’s life: your faith, who you are going to marry and where you go to college.
“He’s passionate about Baylor, so it’s easy for him to sell a kid on Baylor or a family on Baylor because he truly believes that in his heart,” Jennings said.
Mitch’s genuine nature of wanting to get to know players for who they are as a person is something that Mary Conley appreciates most about her dad.
Mary Conley says that one unique aspect of her dad’s coaching strategy is that he strives to make it a goal for his players to attend his funeral to be there for his wife and his girls.
However, in 2012, Mitch and then-manager Steve Smith had building tensions regarding their visions for the future of the program, which ultimately ended in Mitch leaving Baylor, the place he had called home for over 15 years.
“It was a punch in the gut every day I’d get the paper and read about the baseball program, and I wasn’t a part of it because I felt like I was such a part of it before,” Thompson said.
Only a year after his departure from the Baylor program, Mitch kept his family planted in Waco by taking the head coaching job at nearby McLennan Community College, less than seven miles up the road from Baylor Ballpark.
Mitch had offers to be an assistant coach at just about every school in the country and also had the opportunity to take other power-five head coaching jobs, “but it was just the wrong time to move my two girls,” he said.
With two daughters who were very involved in their youth groups and their schools, Mitch didn’t want to relocate his family if he didn’t have to.
“I’m very thankful that he put his family first and knew that [staying in Waco] was the right thing to do. I think I would have been a very different person if I bounced around as most coach’s kids do,” Mary Conley, who was in high school at the time, said.
“It was everything for us to get to stay and everything that [the people at MCC] believed in him enough to hire him and allow us to stay,” Amber said.
Mitch went on to build the MCC program into a perennial junior college powerhouse, taking the Highlanders to the NJCAA World Series four times in nine years and winning a National Championship in 2021.
In his nine seasons at MCC, Mitch compiled a 372-138-1 record and helped produce 16 MLB Draft picks, including the top NJCAA selection in three of the last four drafts. He also guided 108 players to go on and play at four-year universities, 87 of whom went on to play at the Division I level.
Mitch loved every minute of his time at MCC but always believed that being the head coach at Baylor was his ‘dream job.’
“I’ve been here in Waco 28 years and spent 18 years at Baylor, gone for 10 but absolutely wanted to come back if the opportunity ever came back,” Mitch said.
And in late May, when the head coaching job at Baylor opened up, Mitch immediately pounced on the opportunity. Despite an extensive hiring process that featured hours of in-person and over-the-phone interviews, Mitch remained hopeful but still unsure if he would even get the job.
On June 14, Baylor Assistant Athletic Director Kevin Goll called Mitch at about 12:30 in the afternoon, asking if he could be at the Simpson Athletic Center, located on BU’s campus, by 1 p.m.
Mitch replied that he couldn’t because he was two hours away in Huntsville recruiting at the Area Code Tryouts and didn’t plan on leaving until 5 p.m.
Goll said that leaving later in the evening wasn’t going to work and that he would have to give Mitch a call back later.
“I can leave right now for the right reason, if you know what I mean,” Mitch immediately texted Goll.
Goll responded, telling Mitch to “do that” and not to tell anyone what was going on.
Mitch told his staff with a little bit of a “wink-wink” that he had a busted pipe at his house and hightailed it back home.
Once he arrived in Waco, the offer was officially on the table, and Mitch said, “I jumped across the table and gave them a hug and signed it as fast they gave it to me.”
The following day on June 15, Baylor Athletics announced that Mitch Thompson would be hired as the 20th head baseball coach in program history.
For Amber, Mitch coming back to be the head baseball coach at Baylor after being gone for 10 years meant coming home, “This is more than just a job and more than just a school to both of us … It was his dream job. It means coming home.”
Despite this being Mitch’s ‘dream job,’ he knew how much work was in store for him once he arrived on campus. Mitch hit the ground running, assembling a staff and putting together a roster, but he said it was still surreal to him how all of this came to be.
“Every day I walk in here, and I have a smile on my face,” Mitch said. “I realize every day I walk in here how blessed I am. I realize how God opened doors for me. He was faithful, and I realize the opportunity I have here to impact young men’s lives while trying to bring this program back to greatness, and that’s what we are going to do every day we are here.”
Mitch taking the Baylor job wasn’t just a feel-good story about coming home. It meant that the man who has spent over 30 years of his life coaching, and 28 of those years in Waco, would finally have an opportunity to bring the program he so dearly loves back to the national stage of college baseball as a head coach.
“I want to try and take this place to new heights and be a perennial College World Series team,” Mitch said. “And whenever my day comes to an end, I want to retire and come watch Baylor play for the next however long I get to do it. We have big aspirations, and I think we can accomplish them. So that’s what we are here to do.”
Mitch Thompson’s debut as Baylor’s head baseball coach is against Central Michigan at 3 p.m. on Feb. 17 at Baylor Ballpark.