Pierce takes over the program where he served as a longtime assistant under legendary head coach Wayne Graham.
David Pierce is heading back to Houston.
Two hundred and sixty-six days after being terminated on the Forty Acres, the former Texas Longhorns head coach was hired by the Rice Owls on Monday to replace Jose Cruz Jr., fired last week after a 2-10 start to the season and a 63-126 record over three-plus seasons as the replacement for legendary head coach Wayne Graham.
“Rice represents a very special place for my family and me, and I am truly honored to have this opportunity to return to Reckling Park as the head coach of the Owls. “I owe a great deal of my success as a head coach to my time at Rice, and I firmly believe we have all the elements in place to add to the great tradition here,” Pierce said in a statement released by the school.
“I did not want to wait until the end of the season because I believed that we have great potential and a lot of baseball in front of us this year.”
A special assistant to the head coach at Texas State this season, Pierce will coach his first game for Rice on Friday against Florida Atlantic in Boca Raton.
“We are excited to bring David Pierce back to South Main as the next head coach of Rice Baseball,” Rice athletics director Tommy McClelland said. “Although it is unconventional to bring a new head coach in during the season, as soon as Coach Pierce and I came to an agreement that he would be our next head coach, he expressed his strong desire to start immediately. It is a testament not only to the bright future ahead for Rice Baseball but also to the potential of our current team.”
A Wharton County JC and Houston alum, Pierce began his coaching career in the high school ranks in Houston, receiving his big break from Graham in 2003 as a hitting coach after two years as an assistant at his alma mater. Pierce eventually transitioned to coaching the pitchers and had five straight seasons in which his pitchers ranked in the top 30 in staff ERA.
The success at Rice earned Pierce the head coaching job at Sam Houston in 2012 with a stop at Tulane before taking over from Angie Garrido in Austin in 2016.
In eight seasons at Texas, Pierce went 297-162 with three College World Series appearances, three Big 12 regular season titles, and two Big 12 Coach of the Year awards, but diminishing returns over his last two seasons prompted athletics director Chris Del Conte to move on from Pierce and hire longtime friend Jim Schlossnagle away from Texas A&M.
Under Schlossnagle, Texas is now up to No. 8 in the country amidst a 17-game winning streak after a weekend sweep of Mississippi State in the program’s first SEC series.