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-> Very few, if any, college baseball coaching staffs have the shared history of the four guys calling the shots at UConn. None have the continuity.
Jim Penders and his assistants — Jeff Hourigan, Josh MacDonald, Chris Podeszwa — are all UConn graduates. And they’ve been together with the Huskies for the past 13 of Penders’ 21 years as head coach, longer than any of the other 294 NCAA Division I coaching staffs in America.
“If there's a secret sauce, it's that these guys are my friends,” Penders, a 1994 UConn grad, said recently while gathered around muffins and breakfast sandwiches with Hourigan and Podeszwa at the program’s base of operations, the Rizza Performance Center. “We had a budgeting meeting last week and an administrator was saying, ‘You guys can have your own rooms on the road. Josh doesn't have to room with Jeff, and you don’t to room with Dezzy anymore.’ I looked at her like she had four heads. Why would I do that? We lose three straight and he's keeping me from going off the deep end. I need a therapist and a priest on the road sometimes, and he's that.” <-