Published on Show Me Mizzou April 30, 2024
Story by Joe Walljasper, BJ ’92
In May 2023, Tim Jamieson received word that he was elected to the University of Missouri Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame. It was a great honor for Jamieson, whose successful 22-year run as head baseball coach ended in 2016. It provided closure on the black-and-gold era of his career.
Or so he thought.
A month later, Missouri hired Kerrick Jackson as its new head baseball coach. Jackson previously had been an assistant under Jamieson at MU, and more recently Jamieson had served as Jackson’s pitching coach at the University of Memphis. Jackson asked Jamieson if he would join him in the same role at Missouri.
“We had just sold our house in Columbia in January 2023,” Jamieson says. “We had moved on. I never envisioned being back in Columbia, let alone coaching baseball at the university. I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to do it, but as the former players started to reach out, they were excited about it. They’ve always been an inspiration for me.”
Suddenly, his Mizzou athletic career was no longer in the past tense.
At this stage of his career, Jamieson enjoys getting the chance to teach without the stress and administrative duties of being a head coach. One of his strengths is finding and developing future MLB pitchers — most notably Max Scherzer — and now he gets to focus specifically on that task. And who better for Jackson to lean on for advice than a hall-of-fame coach?
“At whatever point in time I’m finally done — and I hope it’s not any time soon — I want to have the program be in a better place than it was when I left the first time and where it was when we came back,” Jamieson says. “That’s a pretty strong motivation.”
To read more articles like this, become a Mizzou Alumni Association member and receive MIZZOU magazine in your mailbox. Click here to join.
