Coastal began in 1954 as Coastal Carolina Junior College, founded by the Coastal Educational Foundation — a group of citizens determined to bring higher education to the South Carolina coast. The first classes met at night, in Conway High School, taught by part-time faculty. The College of Charleston ran the operation on contract until 1958. After that, Horry County took it over directly. The arrangement that emerged tied Coastal to the University of South Carolina, and the campus settled on a plot of pine forest between U.S. 501 and S.C. 544 — land donated by Burroughs Timber Company and International Paper. The first building, later named for Edward M. Singleton, opened in 1963.

By 1991 enrollment had crossed 4,000, and the Educational Foundation began pushing for full independence from USC. On July 1, 1993, Governor Carroll Campbell signed the bill on the steps of the Singleton Building, and Coastal Carolina University was born. In the 2010s, Horry County voters approved a one-cent sales tax dedicated to educational construction, and the campus exploded with building. Brittain Hall went up so quickly under the new funding that locals briefly called it Penny Hall. A library wing followed, then science buildings, then dormitories. The university was no longer pretending to be anything other than what it had become.

The mascot is a literary joke that stuck. In the mid-1960s, a group of students and their English professor proposed a new mascot to replace the Trojans — something that paired with USC's Gamecock but gave the school its own identity. They landed on the Chanticleer, the proud rooster from Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale in The Canterbury Tales. It is pronounced SHON-ti-clear, and the teams are affectionately called the Chants. The live mascot rooster is named Maddox. When Coastal became independent in 1993, there were calls to drop the name and find something less tied to the USC system, but the Chanticleer stuck. It turned out to be a brilliant brand — distinctive, unrepeatable, and improbable enough to remember.

In 2016, the Chanticleers baseball team won the College World Series at TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha, beating Arizona 4-3 in the deciding game. It was the university's first national title, and it arrived just hours before Coastal officially joined the Sun Belt Conference. The football program followed its own trajectory — Brooks Stadium expanded to 20,000 seats, the playing surface was famously installed in teal, and by 2020 the Chants were running an undefeated regular season that drew ESPN's College GameDay to Conway. Volleyball player Leah Hardeman became the only Division I athlete in history to win four consecutive conference player-of-the-year awards. The trophies kept arriving.

Behind the athletics is a university with a serious scientific identity. Coastal is a national sea-grant institution and owns part of Waties Island, an Atlantic barrier island that serves as a living laboratory for marine science students. The Gupta College of Science — renamed in 2019 after software entrepreneur Sunny Gupta, a 1992 graduate — runs four research vessels, including the 54-foot R/V Coastal Explorer. The Burroughs & Chapin Center for Marine and Wetland Studies extends that research into community work. By 2025, U.S. News had ranked Coastal seventh in the South for undergraduate teaching, and the Carnegie Classification had granted it Research College status. Not bad for a school whose founders once met in a Turbeville diner.