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-> This has always been the toughest day of the year for Jim Penders, the day his players scatter all over the country, never to meet as a complete corps again. “This is the gut-wrenching day, my least favorite day of the year because you’ve got to say ‘goodbye,’” Penders said Tuesday before boarding a plane home from California. “When that last out is recorded, we’ll never all be together again. That’s the saddest part of these things. It’s just so sudden, unlike any other NCAA sport, they leave for summer ball, for internships, it’s almost immediate scatter.” …
…The NCAA provided a charter so at least this time the coaches and players didn’t have to leave on several separate commercial flights; they were able to say their goodbyes and relive the season during the six-hour flight home.<-
-> “To get one step closer to Omaha, in my tenure we haven’t been that close, is what made it so painful,” Penders said. “We realize, and I realize, that Stanford had the better team, but when you win the first one, and you hang on the way we did, you can taste it, you can smell Omaha. And we got so freaking close, it makes it even tougher. But at the same time it makes you even hungrier to get back there and bang down that door.” <-
-> So the opportunity for UConn baseball to become the next big thing at home; the team from the Northeast to break into the sport’s southern- and western-dominated elite group, is in the offing. But there is one more game to win, one more step to take, one more place to go.
“We’re going to get to Omaha,” Penders said. “I don’t know how, but I know that we’re going to do it. It’s really hard to get there, but I know when we do it’s going to be so awesome.” <-