Davin Pierre just gets things done.
He gets them done on the recruiting trail, he gets them done in the dugout and he gets them done in the win column – and most recently, in a way Grambling State had not seen in over a decade. The Hahnville High alum and Grambling head baseball coach guided his team to the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship with a win in Sunday’s title game, 6-5 over Jackson State.
It is the first conference championship for Grambling since 2010 – a championship Pierre was a part of as an assistant coach.
Grambling (26-26) also earned an automatic bid to the NCAA baseball championship tournament. The team will play in its first NCAA tournament game in 14 years when it takes on No. 3 overall seed and regional host Texas A&M (40-13) Friday at noon. The game will be broadcast on ESPN Plus. The regional is a double-elimination tournament. Texas and Louisiana-Lafayette round out that regional and will play one another to start the tourney.
Pierre is a Grambling alum who has been in the dugout for 14 seasons. Ten of those came as an assistant before Pierre was elevated to head coach in 2021, succeeding former Grambling head coach James Cooper.
Over his head coaching tenure, Grambling has been a fierce competitor in the SWAC ranks, going 20-10 and 22-7 in his first two seasons as head coach before this year’s conference championship, which saw the Tigers go 18-8 in the regular season.
Before taking the helm of the program, Pierre established himself as a major success in his role as the Tigers’ recruiting coordinator, a position he took in 2012. He has brought more than 30 All-Conference selections to the program, including Shemar Page, the first All-American selection for Grambling in more than two decades. Last year, Page threw the 34th NCAA Division I perfect game in a 16-0 victory over Alcorn State.
Since Pierre joined the coaching staff, the Tigers have had 27 all-conference selections and eight MLB draft picks.
“You want kids to buy in,” Pierre told MLB Network prior to a nationally televised game against Alabama State. “We’re not in same culture as before with kids staying three, four years – but we want kids to develop in our program. Baseball is really, really hard, but life is hard. So, we’re trying to teach these kids life lessons to get them ready for the greatest game of all – the game of life. You’ve got bills, you’ve got kids … We want to get them prepared for that and if we’ve done that, I think we’ve done a good job.
“We play a really good brand of baseball … what uniform we wear, the shoes we wear, the culture we have, the style of play we have.”
Pierre was also selected in the Summer of 2023 to be a part of Team USA 16U/17U National Team Development Program. Pierre served as the manager of Team Navy.
