Two years ago, former Miami-Dade College head baseball coach Demie Mainieri was inducted into the National College Baseball Hall of Fame in Lubbock, Texas, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the junior college’s baseball national championship, the first title in Miami’s history.
The University of Miami later won three College World Series championships under Ron Fraser and Jim Morris, but Mainieri was the first college coach to place Miami on the baseball map, and he recalls vividly the special team he assembled that took the Sharks to the national title in 1964.
“It was a truly special team,” he said.
MDC won its lone title nearly three decades before the Miami Marlins and Florida Panthers played their first games, 24 years before the Miami Heat was not around, and close to two decades before the Hurricanes won its first national championships in baseball and football.
The Miami Dolphins didn’t exist yet and neither did Florida International University.
Mainieri ran the baseball program for 30 years, helping to send 35 of his former players to the major leagues, including Bucky Dent, Mike Piazza, Mickey Rivers and Warren Cromartie.
Mainieri was born in New Jersey and graduated from West Virginia University in 1963 with a Ph.D. in education and administration.
He served as an assistant coach in college football at Columbia University under head coach Lou Little.
Mainieri became the first junior college coach to win 1,000 career games.
His son, Paul Mainieri, is currently the head coach for the LSU Tigers baseball team.
Steve Polisar, who was MDC’s shortstop and team captain for the championship squad, said his teammates demonstrated the swagger long before the Hurricanes of the 1980s.
Among the 37 players on the roster, 34 of them were from South Florida.
“When we walked on the field, we had the New York Yankees mentality,” Polisar said. “We felt that we were the best, you had to beat us.”