Twenty-four years since he was hired, on a temporary basis, to be the head baseball coach at Louisiana College, 69-year-old Mike Byrnes is still on the job and, like a fine wine, is mellowing and improving with age.
He’s a bit of an oddity – a Catholic who has coached for two-plus decades at a Baptist college. He is an old-school coach who shows up to work as often as seven days a week, but he looks at times like an old hippie with a gray ponytail. That ponytail is his way of paying homage to the late Tommy Boggs, a former major leaguer and coach for Concordia University, who died in 2022 of throat cancer. Boggs and all of his players shaved their heads before a home game against LC several years ago when Mike’s wife, Colynda, was fighting breast cancer.
Byrnes is fresh off guiding the Wildcats to a 34-21 season for the ages. They won the Red River Athletic Conference Tournament championship for the first time. They advanced to the NAIA Regional, and they twice received votes in the NAIA Top 25 rankings. Byrnes’ team ranked No. 1 in the NAIA in sacrifice bunts (60) and they ranked No. 1 in the RRAC in doubles (112).
Byrnes was voted by his peers as the Coach of the Year in the conference – the first time he has ever won outright such an honor. Three other times he had to share the honor when the school was in the NCAA Division 3 American Southwest Conference.
At a campus where Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer Billy Allgood became a legend as a basketball and baseball coach and athletics director, Byrnes is the winningest baseball coach in the school’s history with 514 victories. Although Allgood built the campus baseball facility that bears his name, it bears little resemblance to the one that Byrnes has renovated and expanded, all with some $1 million generated over the years through fundraising.
“I knew in 10th grade I wanted to coach,” said Byrnes, who has coached at the high school, college and professional levels. “I had some great mentors when I played at Menard in Billy Horn, Don Boniol and Charlie McArthur.”
A 1973 graduate of Menard Central High School, Byrnes spent time at LSUA and LSU before finishing college at LC in 1979.
An Air Force brat whose father was a medic during the Vietnam War, Byrnes has been a Rapides Parish School Board member, and he doubles now as a justice of the peace in Ward 10. His first coaching stints out of college were at Bolton and Marksville High before he went to Tioga in 1983 to become the head coach for football and baseball and powerlifting. He guided the Indians to back-to-back state baseball titles in 1986 and ’87, and his powerlifting teams won state in 1989, ’90 and ’91.
He then entered the business world for several years, albeit the sports medicine business, and Sheila Johnson, then the athletics director at LC, offered him the job in May of 2000 as head baseball coach. The program was in tatters with bad morale and a 23-73 record for the two previous seasons.
Byrnes agreed to take the job on a part-time basis. “I told her, ‘I’ll give you two years and try to straighten things out.’ I’m still here (no more as a part-timer) so I guess we still haven’t straightened things out.”
“From Day 1, he had a plan,” said Russ Springer, a longtime friend of Byrnes and former LSU and 18-year big league pitcher from Pollock who is a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. “He was not going to use this job as a stepping- stone to go somewhere else. He wanted to stay and build a program, and that’s what he’s done.”
All the while, the rock in his life, he said, has been his wife of 41 years, the former Colynda Hayes, who is cancer-free for 10 years.
“She is my head coach,” he said. “She’s as tough a human being as I’ve ever been around. She makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for my guys. She’s at every game.” They live in Tioga, and they have two sons and six grandchildren.
“I’m a baseball coach,” he said, “but I am a husband and grandfather first.”