Newfield’s Mickey Beach returns to Coastal Carolina baseball

In 2016, Newfield native and Tompkins Cortland Community College alum Mickey Beach was a 20-year-old baseball player looking to take a different route in the sport. He ventured to Coastal Carolina University—a Division I school in South Carolina that had just won its first-ever national championship—and spent the next five years as a student manager and a graduate assistant. Now 28, Beach is back with the Chanticleers in a much larger capacity.

On June 27, Beach was announced as Coastal Carolina’s director of baseball operations after spending the past three years as an assistant coach at Longwood University, a Division I program in Virginia. When given the chance to return to his old stomping ground, he simply couldn’t pass it up.

“Not only do I have the opportunity to come back to a top 25 national brand at Coastal Carolina, but it’s my alma mater,” Beach said. “I’ve got a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees from Coastal Carolina. I spent five years here. I met my wife in grad school here. It’s just a very special place for me, a place that I felt like I was going back home to. I grew up in New York but spending such valuable years of my life at Coastal, I felt like I was going back home. [It’s] an incredible opportunity and one I jumped on.”

It seemed inevitable that Beach would be back at his alma mater. Longwood’s head coach Chad Oxendine was brought in as their associate head coach and recruiting coordinator just 16 days before Beach’s hiring. In fact, Oxendine was the director of baseball operations during Beach’s first stint at Coastal Carolina. It’s only fitting that the duo stuck together in the next chapter of their careers.

“Chad’s one of my best friends,” Beach said. “He was a groomsman in my wedding. [He’s] a guy that I really look up to. He’s been an incredible mentor to me both on and off the field…. He’s been a great resource for me [and] somebody that I can lean on in this new position. He’s been great.”

Beach explained the many tasks he will take on in his return to the program.

“I’ll be handling the day -to-day operations of the program, whether it be setting up our flights to go out of town, conference schedules, teams coming in for our opening tournaments,” Beach said. “[I’ll] basically be the liaison between the coaching staff and the players to make sure the players have the best college baseball experience in the country. Our goal, day in and day out, is the student athlete experience. So whatever the players may need at that specific time, I’m kind of there to make sure they have it, whether it be gear, apparel, food, travel, all that stuff. The biggest part of the job is just overseeing the budget—dotting the t’s, crossing the i’s, making sure that the money works out budgetarily at the end of the year.”

Not only did Beach learn a lot from Oxendine, he also learned from one of the most respected coaches in all of college baseball. Gary Gilmore led the program from 1996 until his retirement in 2024. During that time, he amassed 1,118 wins, 19 NCAA Tournament appearances, and that 2016 national championship. Beach certainly knows from the best how to run a successful program.

“Coach Gilmore was very much about doing the right thing every time,” Beach said. “We talk a lot about discipline and integrity in the program. And it’s simple: doing the right thing every time, the way it’s supposed to be done every time. It may not always be the easiest, but [it’s] just the integrity of doing what you’re supposed to do when nobody’s looking… Having absolute discipline at all times changed my life.

Beach might not be the last Tompkins County native to make a name for himself in college baseball. While at Longwood, he worked with Trumansburg’s Lucas Taves, a rising junior who handled the analytics department and was a bullpen catcher. Beach has no doubt that big things are coming for Taves in the near future.

“I was in those shoes before,” Beach said. “Anybody that wants to get into baseball, anybody that’s willing to get their nails dirty, I was going to take any opportunity I had to try to help him. Lucas and I have become very, very close. He has very clearly defined goals within baseball that he wants to achieve. He worked really, really hard for us at Longwood. I know as soon as he graduates, he’ll have no issue getting a job, whether it be [in] pro ball or college baseball.”

As Beach settles into his new role, he aims to help the Chanticleers make it back to the College World Series and win it all like they did eight years ago.

“The goal is Omaha, and the goal is to win the very last baseball game of the year,” Beach said. “We’re going to talk about it every single day so it becomes part of their daily routine.”