From the moment he arrived at USC in July 2023, then-senior catcher Connor Clift was bent on bringing the USC Trojans, a baseball program with 12 College World Series championships, back to national prominence.
Clift helped contribute to that goal last year, posting six multi-hit games while also maintaining a perfect fielding percentage. USC went 34-23-1, finishing fourth in the Pac-12 at the end of the regular season despite being projected to finish 10th. However, the Trojans were shockingly left out of the NCAA tournament after many media outlets projected USC as being safely in the field of 64.
“I wanted to bring in guys who I also knew would buy into team and buy into a fabric of unity and bring in some leadership as well,” USC head coach Andy Stankiewicz said. “Connor has leadership skills, he’s not afraid to be vocal or speak up when people aren’t doing things the right way.”
Clift posted a .280 batting average and made 22 starts with 27 game appearances during the 2023 campaign. But, as sophomore pitcher Michael Ebner can attest, Clift’s impact as a team leader was also felt off the field.
“He always brought a positive energy and kind of tried to uplift everybody,” Ebner said. “He, at times, would take the reins and he would be the guy that led conversations in text and that kinda stuff, like kinda took a lead.”
Ebner said Clift’s initiative was necessary to help establish a new team culture under the new coaching staff.
The younger of two adopted boys, Clift grew up in Anaheim, California. While his mom stayed home to take care of Connor and his older brother Spencer — who both spent lots of time playing football and baseball as kids — his dad spent as many as 14 hours a day building up a communications business to support small companies.
The catcher drew inspiration from his dad’s work ethic to prove everyone who doubted his baseball abilities wrong. This was most notable when he attended a USC baseball camp under former head coach Jason Gill, who told him that he wasn’t good enough to play Division I baseball, let alone play at USC.
“I was super lucky to be surrounded by a lot of great people,” Clift said. “My parents never gave up on me; they always pushed me to be good. That’s kind of the stereotypical story, but at the same time, it was never easy. Baseball’s not an easy game. It’s hard and will always be hard. Nobody will ever escape that.”
Clift said he still looks up to his brother a lot and credits some of his success to training with and being around former big leaguers Denny Hocking and Matt Treanor, among others.
Despite earning four varsity letters from Canyon High School, Clift described his younger self as underachieving, and used other influences to help him cope with the stress and lack of success.
After only being recruited to Cal Baptist as a walk-on by head coach Gary Adcock, Clift worked his way up from catching the bullpen without a scholarship in his freshman year, to becoming a significant contributor for the Lancers his sophomore and junior years. With his help, Cal Baptist had a share of the Western Athletic Conference championship in 2021 while also making the All-WAC Second Team.
Clift also had lots of encouragement from his teammates at CBU — a much more positive environment than the one he experienced during his high school days. Despite Adcock telling him that he earned everything he achieved during his three years at CBU, Clift is still grateful that his former coach gave him the opportunity to compete at a Division I baseball program.
“Coach Adcock, when I was at Cal Baptist, changed my life, and Coach Stankiewicz also changed it, in two different ways, " Clift said. “When I needed two different kinds of maturity and lessons that I felt I needed to learn, they both came at the perfect times in my life.”
After graduating with a degree in finance after three years, Clift made the decision to enter the transfer portal and start a new chapter in his baseball career.
“I knew when I went into the portal, I wanted a world-class education,” Clift told 247Sports in July 2022. “I wanted a coaching staff that was wholly committed to their players and I wanted a chance to go to a super regional and beyond.”
His experience in the portal was not pleasant, as he had not received any offers as the 2022-2023 school year quickly approached.
NCAA baseball programs such as USC can only distribute 11.7 scholarships to 27 players each year. Given players’ uncertainty about their MLB Draft status, both roster spots and scholarship money are scarce, leaving athletes waiting with few options and little time to prepare for the upcoming school year. In Clift’s transfer class, only 48% of baseball players who entered the portal actually found a new NCAA-sanctioned institution to continue their college careers, according to data available from the NCAA Transfer Portal Website.
Stankiewicz, who faced off against Clift and the Lancers when he was still the head coach at Grand Canyon, initially tried to court Clift to GCU before taking the job at USC. It didn’t take much for Clift to accept the Trojans’ offer, as USC checked all three of his boxes. He had heard all about how Stankiewicz not only develops players, but also develops young men both on and off the field.
“I saw a tough kid behind the plate; he put together tough at-bats against us,” Stankiewicz said of what he saw in Clift when they matched up against each other.
From his first days as a Trojan, Clift quickly established himself as a vocal team leader who held everyone accountable in a positive and uplifting manner. Clift’s demands for accountability from everyone, including himself, have helped the team improve, especially as the now-graduate catcher has made it clear that everyone in the program should appreciate the opportunity to get to play for USC.
“He’d voice his opinion on things, and coming from where he was to now [being at] USC, he just really made it clear for me to appreciate what we had here,” Ebner said. “He never discredited where he was before, but he was just like, ‘[CBU] didn’t have the resources that we have at SC, and you guys don’t understand how lucky you are to have it.’”
Not only was Clift a team leader, but he also became somewhat of an older brother to many of the freshmen. Ebner can relate to this, as he and Clift became close over their first year together and text all the time now.
“I’d never thought we’d get this close, because he was a lot older and has been doing the college baseball thing for a while,” Ebner said. “It just didn’t feel like we were gonna click the way we did, and it’s definitely been great that we have.”
In addition to being a guiding voice for Ebner, which was both positive and critical, Clift was also someone who could make the whole team laugh. Ebner recalled times Clift entertained the team during road trips and at the Coliseum, when the team hosted recruits on the football field before a game. He also once surprised Ebner and some of the other younger players by visiting their dorm room as a joke.
Clift’s favorite memory so far as a Trojan was celebrating last year when senior outfielder Cole Gabrielson hit a walk-off single during the final game of the Crosstown Showdown against rival UCLA in front of a sold-out crowd at Dedeaux Field.
“It was the number one moment of my baseball career besides my first hit,” Clift said.
Outside of baseball, Clift enjoys golfing with his dad and brother, as well as spending time with his girlfriend, Devyn Canedy, whom he has been with since his junior year of high school. He credits her as a major support system throughout his baseball career.
His main passion, however, is going out on the baseball field and playing ball.
Despite his fun personality, Clift is determined to see the Trojans continue to improve and build on the progress from last year as he vies for the starting catcher spot in the lineup. He played summer ball for the Orange County Riptide, a summer ball team in the California Collegiate League, after the USC season ended last May to help improve every aspect of his game and get consistent playing time this upcoming spring with the Trojans.
“He’s gotta get better. He’s gotta get better at all of his game. He’s gotta take better at-bats,” Stankiewicz said. “He had a nice year last year, but he was streaky. Streaky, inconsistent hitters are hard to manage. Consistent hitters that give you quality at-bats day in and day out, those are the ones that get on the field a lot. He hit .280, but let me tell you, it was a streaky .280. It was kind of a roller coaster ride. And so, he’s gotta get better. He’s gotta handle the slider down and away.”
In addition to wanting to make an impact in the starting lineup on a nightly basis for the Trojans, Clift also wants to help lead the Trojans back to Omaha and bring home another College World Series trophy, and is using the emotion he felt from last season’s abrupt end to make it happen.
“You’re sitting in your locker room and you’re waiting for your name to go across the screen. Fourth place in the Pac-12 and all this other stuff,” Clift said. “And then you get left out. The emptiest I’ve ever felt in my entire life. You thought you were gonna be in it, and to be honest, you felt like you deserved to be in it, had the resume to do it. And you get left out, and nothing you can control with the selection committee. And you look around like, ‘So that’s how this all ends?’ And so we’re going off that feeling, like I never want to feel that again. And I think that’s where it starts.”
Having spent so much time around him, Ebner said he knows just how much Clift is aching to have a shot at winning it all.
“Of course I, and everyone else, want to win the College World Series, but to watch him win would make it that much more special for me, cause I know how badly he wants it,” Ebner said.
After graduating in May with a Master of Studies in law, Clift plans to get a job in commercial banking with a focus on helping small and medium-sized businesses. However, he said that he would also consider the opportunity to continue his baseball career as a professional if he gets the chance.
Regardless of the direction of his life and career after college, Clift said he knows that having a master’s degree from USC will provide him with endless opportunities.
But wherever Clift ends up after USC, Stankiewicz knows that Clift’s positive attitude and mentality will take him a long way in life.
“I think he’s a stand-up young man,” Stankiewicz said. “He’s all about the team; he’s all about others. I think he was raised in a servant-leadership home, where he understands that the world doesn’t revolve around him.”
Clift looks forward to continuing his baseball journey and mentoring the incoming freshman class as he puts on the Trojan uniform for one last season.