BATON ROUGE- LSU Baseball Head Coach Paul Mainieri was named the recipient for the 2018 Rod Dedeaux Coach of the Year award by USA Baseball on Friday.

He earned the award for his performance coaching the USA collegiate national team last summer.Mainieri led the team to series wins over Chinese Taipei, Japan and Cuba.

Mainieri is the second LSU coach to receive this honor, as the legendary Skip Bertman won the award in 1996.

The LSU Baseball team opens up preseason practice on January 25th.