When Jason Gill got the call and offer to be the next head baseball coach at USC, his immediate, reflexive response was, "Are you guys kidding me?"

"They got really quiet and I said, 'Yes, I'll take the job!'" Gill recalls, sitting in his new office just four days after the official announcement last month. "... Put yourself in my shoes. I grew up in Southern California, I was raised in Tustin, Calif., and every day you wake up -- that was before the internet -- you read the paper and every day in the paper it's USC football, USC baseball, USC basketball, USC track and field, USC, USC, USC.

"You always hope one day that you can be a part of that, or you're jealous if you're not. So for 49 years I've been jealous, and now I get to be a part of it so I'm excited."

Gill, who spent the last 11 seasons across town as the head coach at Loyola Marymount, knows the tradition of USC baseball as well as anyone, and that's important. He both knows what's possible from a program that's won more national championships than any other in college baseball, and also what the standard remains from fans despite the Trojans making the NCAA postseason just once in the last 14 years.

As he explained, Gill's initial response to that job offer speaks to what this opportunity means to him -- and not in the least any self doubt as to whether he's the man for the job.

Gill does not lack confidence, and in talking to him for 40 minutes about his baseball past and what he believes is possible for USC's baseball future, it's easy to see how he made an impression on USC administrators.

He is a well-connected recruiter throughout the state -- perhaps the most important attribute he brings to the table -- and an experienced head coach who has learned from some acclaimed mentors while also finding his own style.

But his belief in his ability to resurrect this storied program is palpable and convincing. He'll have to prove it on the field where his recent predecessors have fallen short, but say this for Gill, he does not seem at all intimidated by that challenge.

"To be quite frank, I'm not going to put a timeline on anything. I've been given a five-year contract. I'd be disappointed if it took five years, I can tell you that. I don't anticipate that at all," he says of getting USC baseball back to being a postseason presence again. "But everybody's got a responsibility in this, and I would say that it would happen in short order if the players choose to buy in. ... Because the talent's there. Look at the recruiting classes. The recruiting classes match up as well as anybody's on the west coast. Now it's about taking the talent and getting it disciplined, and discipline has a lot of hard conversations and a lot of hard coaching.

"So it's going to be on them whether or not they want to jump on. But the train's starting, we're going and we're going to take this team, I promise -- I know it's hot air until we do it -- but I promise you that we will win here and we will win big here. That's going to happen. I know it is."

RELATED: Listen to more from Gill as he joined the Trojan Talk podcast

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One's history as an athlete may not always carry relevance into what kind of coach that person becomes, but in Gill's case, well, it seems very telling.

"Out of high school I think I was like 5-8, 132 pounds," says Gill, who attended Mater Dei HS in Santa Ana. "One school recruited me -- Orange Coast College. Mike Mayne was a legendary junior college coach. … He called up and said, 'Hey, we like the way you play. If it doesn't work out for you here, we'll help you find another place.' Well, they were the only ones who called me, and the rule in my house was if you're not playing sports you're getting a job. So I was like, I'm going to Orange Coast College to play sports because I don't want to get a job."

Gill was redshirted his first year at Orange Coast College, and because he believed he was good enough to play he took the coach up on his offer to help him find a new school after that season. He landed at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, where he started for two years. Still, he felt he could play on a larger stage than the JUCO ranks, but his belief in his potential was seemingly greater than anyone else's.

He spent that summer in Iowa playing in the Jayhawk League, not knowing where he'd be in the fall. One of his teammates that summer was Kenny Gajewski, who is now the Oklahoma State softball coach.

"[He said], 'You have anywhere to play next year? ... Well, I play at [Call State] Dominguez Hills. I'll call my coach and you'll have a scholarship at the end of the week.' I was like, 'What?'" Gill says, telling the story. "Two days later the coach calls me and says, 'If Kenny tells me you're good enough, you're good enough.' Never saw me play. I get a tuition scholarship to go to Dominguez Hills."

After a year there, Gill still aspired for more. He couldn't get a call back from the baseball coaches at Long Beach State, so he moved on to a connection his brother had to Cal State Fullerton assistant coach George Horton (who was the head coach at Oregon the last decade before parting ways after this season). Gill met more resistance there, but he didn't relent.

"I got a hold of coach Horton and he told me not to come. I called again and he told me not to come. The fifth time, literally the fifth time, I said, 'Hey coach, I want to be a coach.' At that point I knew I wanted to be a coach. … I just said, 'Hey, let me be there in the fall and if I don't make the team I will have learned from you and coach [Augie] Garrido for what I want to do for the rest of my life," Gill recounts. "He was like, 'All right, come on out.' I think we had 13 infielders and I started out ranked 13th and I worked my way up to fourth throughout the fall."

Come January, though, he was still relegated to the C team and continued to try to make an impression any way he could until his big break arrived.

Cal State Fullerton had an exhibition game with a Korean baseball team, and Garrido -- who would win five national championships between Fullerton and Texas -- came to his eager second baseman with an opportunity.

"I thought it was just a courtesy start because I worked hard. I've always been that guy to a coach," Gill says. "I get the start. Coach Garrido said, 'Have you ever played third base?' I said, 'Yeah, I played there all summer.' I had never played there in my life. I never took a groundball there, I don't think ever in my life. Long story short, I end up starting for them at third base and I think played like 44 games or 47 games. Got to play in Omaha. Hit like .340 or .345. It's kind of a little bit of a Cinderella story in itself, just my journey."

He parlayed that experience into his first opportunity in coaching, as an undergraduate assistant the next year when Cal State Fullerton won the 1995 College World Series. After stops at Nevada, Loyola Marymount and UC Irvine, he returned to Cal State Fullerton as an assistant coach under Horton -- the man he had diligently pestered for that pivotal opportunity years earlier.

After a subsequent one-year stint at Oregon, Gill took his first head coaching job at Loyola Marymount leading into the 2009 season. His teams there reached the West Coast Conference Tournament, limited to the top four teams, five of the last six seasons, won it this season and pushed UCLA to a winner-take-all NCAA Regional final. It was the first NCAA tournament appearance for the program since 2000.

So, when asked what gives Gill confidence that he can now lead USC to greater heights, he doesn't hesitate.

"Without sounding like an egotistical maniac, I give myself the confidence. I'm in a very good place and I have been for about six years in my profession. I believe that I have a great plan, I have a great template for success," he says. "Like I've talked about earlier, I have the best mentors any coach can have, in my opinion. So I'm confident in my ability to lead and teach, and I'm confident I'll put together one of the best coaching staffs in the country -- because I can't do it alone -- that can lead and teach.

"So yeah, I guess my confidence comes from within. I can't get it from anybody else."

College baseball recruiting is a unique challenge in general. Division I programs are limited to 11.7 scholarships from which to build a 35-man roster with 27 of those players able to receive some portion of that scholarship pool.

Add to that the cost of education at USC, relative to other schools against whom the Trojans compete for talent, and that's another layer specific to this job.

Asked if that makes coaching at USC a steeper challenge, Gill counters.

"It's just a different challenge. It's just different. I wouldn't call it steeper. It's just a different set of rules for us than it would be for a state school in the state of California, where it's a fairly reasonable education," he says. "But they're still living on the edge of the 11.7, guys getting drafted. It's just the amounts of money are different, it's just a different set of challenges."

A set of challenges that has now led USC to run through several coaches since its 12th and most recent College World Series national championship in 1998.

Mike Gillespie, the coach of that last national title team, stepped down after the 2006 season. Chad Kreuter last four seasons as USC head coach, Frank Cruz held the post for two years and Dan Hubbs led the program for the last seven seasons. Hubbs' 2015 Trojans team was the only one in the last 14 years to reach the NCAA Regionals. The program hasn't posted so much as a winning record since.

"We're just going to have to remind them of the standard that's been set by former players -- not by me. This is the standard that was set by the '98 team, this is the standard set by [previous successful teams], on and on," Gill says.

That said, he will not talk about national championships specifically with his squad. He will emphasize the standards expected on and off the field, that winning doesn't start between the white lines and that once this group shows what it's full potential is that will become the baseline from which they will grow moving forward.

As noted, Gill's recruiting acumen may be the most encouraging aspect of his hiring. His official USC bio touts how he landed a pair of top-25 recruiting classes at Loyola Marymount. But perhaps he can explain it better than the resume does.

"I'm from Southern California, recruiting is a lot about networking and ties and I don't think there's a person in the state of California that has better ties than I do," he says. "I've been here working on building relationships for 24 years in this business, and I feel like my reputation is a good reputation. Coaches and players and club coaches trust me [that] when I tell them we're going to take care of your player, we're going to take care of your kid, this is a place you want to go. …

"And then my track record for developing players. Me and my coaches in the past have done a very good job of taking guys at LMU who weren't maybe top-round draft picks or even thought of on the draft board and getting them drafted in the first 10 rounds -- and a lot of them. The development piece is a big deal."

USC has not yet announced the rest of Gill's coaching staff, other than that he's retaining assistant coach/recruiting coordinator Gabe Alvarez. Gill also noted he has his pitching coach in mind, but he wasn't ready to reveal that just yet.

In the meantime, he's already hit the recruiting trail, already started trying to make the same impression on prospects that he made on the USC administration in landing the job. He may be joining in a bit late in this recruiting cycle here, but he's not worried about that.

"The good news is when you wear USC across your chest it doesn't take you long to recover," he says of this recruiting class.

That just as easily could have been his response to getting USC back on top in general.

As he acknowledged, words are just words until proven in action, but what he can do right now is deliver that message -- to recruits as well as the players he's inheriting -- and start the process of building the foundation for the turnaround he envisions, all the while understanding nothing comes easy.

"There's going to be some change, and sometimes change is difficult for people to handle, in my experience," Gill says. "I've done it already. I've turned programs around so I know how it works, and because of that experience I'll be able to do it quicker than I did the first time. I've learned the hard way, which is how most people do learn. …

"I don't know how it's been run here over the last 14 years that they've been in the postseason one time, but I do know it's going to be run the way I know how a winner works."