LSU head coach Paul Mainieri was inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2014 and has the most wins — 1,501 — among active Division I baseball coaches.

BATON ROUGE — LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri, who led the Tigers to the 2009 national championship and is tops all active NCAA Division I coaches with 1,501 career victories, announced Friday that he will retire at the end of the 2021 season.

Mainieri cited his health as one of the main factors in the decision, adding that the decision was his and he had not been forced out after a 34-22 regular season and loss in the first round of the SEC Tournament. Mainieri’s collegiate career spans 39 seasons, including the past 15 years at LSU. He will coach the Tigers in the 2021 NCAA Tournament should they receive a berth in the 64-team field that will be announced Monday.

“I have been the luckiest guy in the world to have lived out a childhood dream of becoming a college baseball coach,” Mainieri said. “I’ve worked at four wonderful institutions, and it’s been the honor of my life to have served as the head coach at LSU for 15 years. To have carried the torch of a program built by Skip Bertman, the greatest college baseball coach of all time, has been a tremendous privilege. It has always been my unwavering goal to sustain the excellence that was created here.

“I’ve been blessed throughout my career to coach unbelievable young men of great character and skill, and to have worked with talented and dedicated assistant coaches, support staff and administrators. It’s very difficult to leave a profession that I truly love, but I’m so grateful for the amazing opportunities that have been presented to me through the years.”

Mainieri said he had been thinking about retiring for a couple of months but made the decision Thursday after talking Thursday with his wife, Karen.

“I reached out to (LSU athletic director) Scott (Woodward),” Mainieri said. “I told him I hadn’t been feeling well and told him I felt that maybe the program would be better served it somebody else was leading it and that hurt to say that because I love coaching and I love doing what I’m been doing for 39 years. I can’t even begin to tell you how fantastic Scott was to me.”

Mainieri said he wanted to make the announcement now to give Woodward a chance to get a new coach as soon as possible and to try to prevent current players from considering the transfer portal.

“Paul Mainieri has made an immeasurable impact not only at LSU, but across college baseball,” Woodward said. “Every day he has taken the field, he has honored the game he loves with his class, his character, and his commitment to excellence. We are forever grateful for the championships he has won, the student athletes he has inspired, and memories he has gifted our fans over 15 seasons.”

Mainieri, 63, has a 1,501-774-8 (.659) career record that includes six seasons at St. Thomas (1983-88), six seasons at Air Force (1989-94), 12 seasons at Notre Dame (1995-2006) and 15 seasons at LSU (2007-21). He is No. 7 all-time among NCAA Division I Baseball coaches in career wins.

He is one of only five coaches in NCAA Division I Baseball history to win 1,500 games and a national championship. The others are Augie Garrido (Cal State Fullerton/Texas), Gene Stephenson (Wichita State), Jim Morris (Miami) and Mark Marquess (Stanford).

But Mainieri said he began experiencing neck problems after a visit to the gravesites of hiswife’s parents in Ohio in 2018. After returning to Baton Rouge, Maineri said he thought he had slept wrong because his neck hurt, but the problem persisted so he sent his X-rays and MRIs to a former player of his at Notre Dame, now a surgeon in Chicago.

“… he diagnosed the problem and said that I needed to have surgery,” Mainieri said. “I went to Chicago and had the surgery on my neck and it helped quite a bit but it didn’t totally take care of the problem.”

He consulted another surgeon, which led to another surgery.

“… it helped some as well but I’ve just been having this terrible neck pain for almost three years now and it’s kind of morphed into these headaches,” Mainieri said. “I just have not felt well for almost three years now. It affects my sleeping and how I feel during the day.”

Friends also have been telling him he looks awful, and he said he looks the way he feels.

“I just haven’t felt myself for the last couple of years and I think it’s really affected the way I’ve been able to coach because as a coach, I think that one of my greatest strengths has been to be very engaged with the players,” Mainieri said. “I just haven’t been able to do that as much the last couple of years. Consequently, I just don’t feel like I’ve been the same coach. I just don’t feel like I’ve been carrying my weight.”

During Mainieri’s LSU tenure, the Tigers have won 30 team championships, including the 2009 NCAA title, eight NCAA Regional championships, five College World Series appearances/NCAA Super Regional championships, four Southeastern Conference championships, six SEC Tournament titles and six SEC Western Division crowns. His six SEC tournament titles tie him with former LSU coach Skip Bertman and former Alabama coach Jim Wells for the most in league history.

The 2009 team featured former Westgate High School standout Jared Mitchell, who also played on LSU’s 2007 BCS national championship team. Mitchell was named 2009 College World Series Most Outstanding Player. That team posted a 56-17 overall record, including a 10-1 mark in NCAA Tournament competition.

Mainieri, a four-time national Coach of the Year, is the second-winningest coach at LSU with a 637-282-3 (.693) mark, and he has the third-highest career winning percentage in SEC history, trailing only Bertman, who was 870-330-3 (.724) from 1984-2001, and former South Carolina coach Ray Tanner, who posted a 738-316 (.700) mark from 1997-2012.

Under Mainieri, the Tigers earned an NCAA Tournament Top 8 National Seed in six consecutive seasons (2012-17), making LSU and Stanford (1999-2004) the only schools in NCAA history to capture six straight Top 8 National Seeds. Since 2008, LSU has earned nine NCAA Tournament National Seeds, the second-best mark in the country over the past 13 seasons.

Mainieri’s LSU players have earned First-Team All-America recognition on 13 occasions, and 20 of his former Tigers have played Major League Baseball, including MLB All-Stars DJ LeMahieu, Alex Bregman and Aaron Nola. LSU players have been chosen in the MLB Draft on 88 occasions during Mainieri’s tenure, including a first-round selection in seven of the past 12 seasons.

He served as the head coach of the United States Collegiate National Team for its 2018 summer tour and led Team USA to a 12-3 record that included series victories over Chinese Taipei, Japan and Cuba.

Mainieri was inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2014 in Dallas, where he joined his his father, Demie Mainieri, who coached Miami-Dade North Community College to 1,012 wins and a national title in his 30-year career. Demie and Paul Mainieri are the only father-son combination in the ABCA Hall of Fame.

During Mainieri’s tenure, 103 LSU baseball players have earned their degrees. Twenty-five of the graduates were players who signed professional contracts before completing their college eligibility and returned to LSU to finish their degree requirements. In addition, LSU players have received SEC Academic Honor Roll recognition on 141 occasions over the past 14 seasons.

Mainieri had served for 12 seasons as the head coach at Notre Dame when he accepted the LSU position under Bertman, at the time the school’s athletic director. Mainieri’s Notre Dame teams won 14 different team titles, including a 2002 NCAA Super Regional championship and a berth in the College World Series. Sixty of Mainieri’s Fighting Irish players signed professional contracts, and eight of them reached the Major Leagues.

He also was the first civilian baseball coach at the United States Air Force Academy, from 1989-94, and four of his players went on to attain the rank of general in the armed forces. One of his former players, retired Major Mike Kazlausky, is now the head coach at Air Force.

His collegiate coaching career began in 1983 at St. Thomas University in Miami. In March 2013, St. Thomas named its new baseball facility in honor of Mainieri, who also worked as the school’s director of athletics for three years.

Mainieri first joined the coaching profession at his alma mater, Columbus High School in Miami, where he worked as assistant baseball coach for head coach Jim Hendry, his best friend and future GM of the Chicago Cubs, and assistant football coach. He was inducted into the Columbus High Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.

Along with his father, he counted among his mentors Hall of Fame manager and two-time World Series champion Tommy Lasorda of the Los Angeles Dodgers and legendary former University of New Orleans baseball coach and athletics director Ron Maestri, who led UNO to the College World Series in 1984.

Mainieri, who was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and raised in Miami, earned a letter in 1976 as a freshman outfielder at LSU, where he also met his future wife, Karen, then a Fighting Tiger cheerleader.

Mainieri played one season for his father at Miami-Dade North Community College and two seasons at UNO, where the second baseman helped the Privateers win two Sun Belt Conference titles and advance to the 1979 NCAA Tournament.

After completing his undergraduate degree requirements at Florida International in 1980, Mainieri earned a master’s in sports administration from St. Thomas in 1982.

• American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame Inductee (2014)

• Four-Time National Coach of the Year

• Two-Time SEC Coach of the Year (2009, 2015)

• U.S. Collegiate National Team Head Coach (2018)

• Career Record (38 seasons): 1,467-752-8 (.661)

• LSU Record (14 seasons): 603-260-3 (.698)

LSU Baseball under Paul Mainieri (2007-Present)

• NCAA National Champions — 2009

• NCAA National Runners-Up — 2017

• College World Series Appearances — 2008, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017

• NCAA Super Regional Champions – 2008, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017

• NCAA Regional Champions – 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019

• NCAA Tournament National Seeds – 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019

• Southeastern Conference Champions — 2009, 2012, 2015, 2017

• SEC Tournament Champions — 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2017

• SEC Western Division Champions — 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017