To the frustration of many, a proposal to allow a third paid assistant coach in college baseball was voted down earlier this year. During the season, Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn and Tennessee coach Tony Vitello were among the vocal critics of the decision. Recently, in Omaha, Mississippi State’s Jake Mangum made a passionate plea for a third paid assistant and more scholarships.

On Sunday, ahead of the College World Series championship series between Vanderbilt and Michigan, the coaches were asked to comment on Mangum’s statement and share their own thoughts on the third coach/scholarship issues in the sport.

VU coach Tim Corbin delivered a powerful response of over 2 minutes (below), calling the vote against the third assistant sinful and dehumanizing:

Here’s the text of Corbin’s answer, via ASAP transcript:

Q. A couple days ago Jake Mangum made a pretty passionate statement about the third assistant and scholarships. Wanted to get your perspective on that.

TIM CORBIN: I’m 32 years old, I’m married, I have a child, I leave the home at 7:30 every morning, I come back at 8:00, 9:00 at night. I do it Sunday through Sunday. I don’t get paid. I don’t get compensated. My wife stays home with a baby, can’t afford daycare. And God forbid he goes to daycare, gets sick, I don’t have benefits so I can’t pay for that.

Can’t get a ticket to a football game, can’t get a ticket to a basketball game, can’t eat with a recruit. Why? I’m a volunteer.

I stay all year, I work, I’ve got to go off in the summer, work camps. Why? I can’t recruit. I’m a volunteer.

I make camp money, I come home, put stress on my wife, can’t have another child. Costs money to have children; can’t do it. I’m a volunteer.

It’s the most short-sighted-thinking aspect of our game that we’ve been a part of. We lose good people to other jobs, other sports – softball, professional baseball. They leave baseball because they can’t afford to stay in it. I’ve got a volunteer on my right. Why that hasn’t been changed, why that hasn’t been turned over in the last couple of years is really, really sinful. It’s dehumanizing in so many different ways. It doesn’t open up opportunities. We’re very white inside the sport. Erik and I have a collection of minorities, but because we’re very white in the sport, we don’t open up opportunities for other minorities. And I’m not talking about blacks, I’m not talking about Latins, I’m talking about women, I’m talking about other people that have an opportunity to potentially coach at this level, and you say, women in baseball? Women are in the NFL, women are doing Major League Baseball on TV. We limit ourselves greatly.

And because of that, when you’ve got young people that aspire to go to college and play a sport, they look at the people coaching it, and when they don’t see people like them, then they shut down the sport, then they move to another sport.

I can’t believe we’ve done that to ourselves. I can’t believe that we didn’t overturn that and say, we’ll revisit it in 2022. 2022? I don’t know if I’ll be alive. We walk around and think that we’re going to be living the next day. No, that should be adjusted immediately. It’s something that needs to be done.

For a 21-year-old kid like Jake Mangum to speak up, says everything you want to know. Student-athletes thinking about that position, thinking about that position and someone that they work with every single day, someone who’s always there, and you can’t compensate them or reward them with just simple medical benefits, it’s baffling, and it’s sad. It needs to be adjusted quickly, without question. We’re better than that.