Everyone warned Frank Catalanotto.

Long Island friends. Hofstra people. Baseball confidants.

“You can’t win there,” they told him. Not in the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) against those southern schools.

It was then that Catalanotto was convinced this was the job for him. It was his Michael Jordan moment. He took those doubts personally.

“We will win,” was his response. “This coaching staff will help these guys.”

Even he couldn’t have dreamed it would happen so fast, that in his first season he would lead Hofstra to its first-ever NCAA Tournament, that the Pride would win more conference tournament games in one year than it ever had, that he proved you could in fact win at the Long Island school. And he did it with a program that had just one winning season since 2000, was picked to finish last in the CAA and lost three all-league contributors off last year’s sub-.500 team.

“It’s pretty magical I’d say,” senior infielder Ryan Morash said.

“It took us 80-plus years [to reach the NCAA Tournament],” Hofstra athletic director Rick Cole Jr. said. “Then he comes in and it took him one. That’s not bad. I like his timeline.

“There’s no question, the success belongs to Frank.”

Hofstra (30-21) will face North Carolina, the No. 10 national seed and No. 1 in the four-team, double-elimination Chapel Hill Regional on Friday afternoon, riding a nine-game win streak. It got there by winning all four of its CAA Tournament games by one run apiece. Three came via the walk-off, the Pride’s calling card under the 48-year-old Catalanotto.

Following a 19-year professional career that included 14 seasons in the major leagues, he went into real estate. Catalanotto was flipping houses on Long Island. Coaching never interested him until a Twitter direct message popped into his inbox. Adam Rubin, a former sportswriter who knew Catalanotto from his brief time with the Mets and was working as a sports information director at Division II New York Tech, wanted to know if he would have interest in a potential job coaching college baseball.

Catalanotto, a Smithtown, L.I. native, initially passed. He wanted to be there for his four children. But Rubin — now the sports information director at LIU — pressed. Just meet with me, he suggested. At the meeting, Rubin brought the school’s compliance officer to explain the time demands were lighter for Division II than Division I. After they spoke, Catalanotto reached out to a few baseball friends about potentially joining him. Racketball was no longer getting it done from a competitive standpoint.

“We did it and I fell in love with it,” Catalanotto said. “I became passionate about teaching the game of baseball.”

He added: “I texted Adam the other day. I said, ‘Thank you, Adam. Had you not gotten me into this and really persisted, I wouldn’t be doing this.’ ”

New York Tech reached the College World Series in his first year there. But it dropped all sports for at least two years due to budgetary reasons amid the COVID-19 pandemic, leading Catalanotto to Hofstra after a year away from coaching.

In the fall, Catalanotto realized how much work was ahead of him and his staff. At batting practice, Hofstra players were looking to hit home runs, muscling up and trying to pull every pitch. Pitchers were too fine, attempting to make perfect pitches instead of pitching to contact. Players walked to their positions.

The team was in need of a makeover. He emphasized the need for massive changes. At the plate, Hofstra was going to use the entire field and stay inside of the ball. Pitchers were going to pound the strike zone. Everyone had to hustle. “Everything matters,” became a frequently used phrase that was hammered home.

“There were a couple of times where guys walked onto the field instead of running out to their position and we would pull them off the field and say, ‘Listen, this is not how we’re going to do it,’ ” Catalanotto recalled. “After guys see that happen once or twice, everyone starts running hard on the field.”

Not everyone bought in. Two players transferred. Another left the program. Ace right-hander and All-CAA first team selection Brad Camarda admitted the changes were “a lot.” Morash called them “intense.” Hofstra was operating completely differently, abiding by the “everything matters” mantra. It went beyond baseball. Academics were emphasized. The dugout had to be kept clean. Umpires and bus drivers were to be treated with respect.

Players saw how much effort the coaching staff was putting in, how determined and dedicated it was to winning. The staff Catalanotto put together — Matt Wessinger, Chris Rojas, Jimmy Goelz and Charles St. Clair — had just shy of 50 years of professional experience altogether and were running the team like it was a pro outfit.

“You can’t really say no to that,” Morash said. “A lot of us said, ‘You know what? We didn’t have much success here before, let’s try to do something different and do something special now.’ ”

Special might be underselling it. Morash’s adjective — “magical” — seems more appropriate. Hofstra never sniffed June baseball before. It lost significant players from last year’s team. Now, led by a new coach, it is on the sport’s big stage, in Chapel Hill to face powerhouse North Carolina Friday afternoon. It all started with that simple slogan.

“Everything that you do matters and it will all come back to either help you or haunt you in the end,” Morash said. “Us buying into that, saying everything matters, is what made the difference because we handled ourselves like champions way before we were.”

Catalanotto brought that mentality to Hofstra, just as he did at New York Tech. In his only two full seasons as a coach, he’s won big. He obviously doesn’t miss flipping houses.

“Baseball,” Catalanotto said, “is a lot more fun than real estate.”