‘It’s always been home’
Penders’ family history makes his UConn experience personal
STORRS — To talk UConn baseball with coach Jim Penders is often to talk UConn, period. An abbreviated university history lesson made sense to weave into a discussion before his team departed this week for the NCAA Tournament’s Gainesville Regional.
Penders, nearing the end of his 20th year, gives the extended version to players at the start of every season.
“It was a Civil War orphanage for union soldiers,” Penders said. “That was the first building they had here. Then it was the Storrs Brothers’ property. And then they basically gave it away and just wanted to make better farmers.
“The university represents a state that a lot of people think of as elitist. A lot of people think of second homes, or the Gold Coast. Or that’s where actors go, Litchfield County.
Or it’s old money, it’s prep schools. Yet the university represents the polar opposite. It’s about hard work. It’s about people wanting to get better by sweating and getting their hands dirty.”
UConn is many things these days, including an athletic giant. At the heart of that operation, just like Elliot Ballpark is at the heart of a portion of campus transformed by stateof-the-art facilities, is a coach essentially groomed for and funneled toward his job since birth.
Penders, senior class president at East Catholic Manchester and a senior captain catcher at UConn, was an assistant coach for the Huskies under Andy Baylock for seven years before taking over as head coach in 2004. He grew up in Vernon as the son, grandson and nephew of accomplished coaches. The Penders Family is as much a sports and UConn family as any.
Another abbreviated history lesson: Penders paternal grandfather, Jim, won four state championships as baseball coach at Stratford High in 1931-68. His maternal grandfather, Sal Cholko, played in the American Legion World Series and coached Stratford to the 1963 Little League World Series. His father Jim won four state championships as coach at East Catholic in 19692012 and played on UConn’s 1965 College World Series team, in the same lineup with his
brother Tom, a two-sport standout for the Huskies who went on to coach seven college basketball teams.
After graduating from UConn in 1994, Penders spent two years in Washington D.C., fundraising for Iowa senator Tom Harkin. All the while, Baylock was trying to pull him from the political world and bring him back to UConn as a graduate assistant. Penders soon decided that the best way to impact young lives was on the ground level and not in the nation’s capital, where he realized, as he says, the political sausage doesn’t taste as good once you see it being made.
“I grew up in a house where I was drawn through osmosis to coaching because I saw the bonds between my father his players and my uncle and his players, both grandfathers and their players — and how they were lifetime bonds,” said Penders, whose team is facing Texas Tech Friday at noon. “I knew that I needed that. That’s probably a weakness of some sort. But I knew I wanted the same thing that they had.
“That also goes along with hearing the rotary dial phone ringing at night, 11 o’clock, when a guy might be in jail or might be going through a divorce or might have a substance abuse problem or he needs a loan. My father was always there to pick up. So he got to celebrate the great moments, but he was also there for some of those nadirs. He was just there for the high points and low points. I want to be that for my guys. When it’s all said and done every season, I say, ‘I’m here for you’ and I mean it because I got to follow an example.”
UCONN BEGINNINGS
Penders could have left UConn several times over the years. Notre Dame tried to hire him after the Huskies’ Super Regional run in 2011. Michigan tried to hire him last year after another Super Regional appearance. Both jobs would have meant raises in salary and national profile. Other schools have explored trying to hire him in between, and others almost certainly will.
Maybe Penders will reach a point where he’d consider a move. But as a father of three children raised in Connecticut, with parents in the state, and with all of his own roots running through a particular campus, he has always had more personal circumstances to consider.
“My first field trip was to the dairy farms in kindergarten,” Penders said. “We used to come up and feed the ducks at Mirror Lake. I’ve spent my whole life here. It’s always been home and there’s something comfortable about that. But I also find it incredibly challenging. There has to be growth. You don’t want to be too comfortable or too challenged, and I think I’ve found a balance of both. My family is here. I still love it.
“[Then athletic director] Jeff Hathaway and the search committee took a chance on a 31-year-old kid with no head coaching experience and had a modicum of success as assistant coach, not a ton of success. They saw something in me maybe before I saw it in myself. They took a real gamble and a real risk with a program that means an awful lot to a lot of people. And I still owe, not just those people, but everybody in Connecticut who cheers for the Huskies. And I do believe in this place. I believe in the people here, what it stands for.”
The baseball field at East Catholic is named for Penders’ father, like the field at Stratford High is named for his grandfather.
“I don’t know how he can do the things he does, just being around him for six hours,” Penders’ father said. “What he can do in 24 hours is kind of scary to me and he doesn’t forget anybody, remembers everybody. I could never do maybe one quarter of what he can do now. He’s driven. Every day for the last 20 years now, he’s going running every morning, running seven or nine miles. It could be minus-10 degrees or he could be sick. It’s still what he does. That’s how driven he is. Aside from the baseball stuff itself, which is not easy, to get the proper guys to play, and now with this transfer portal, it just amazes me as a father that he can somehow still get through all of this. It blows my mind. He’s a high-energy guy as he always was a son.”
That Jim Penders graduated from UConn in 1966. His brother, Tom, graduated in 1967. Tom was always the most rambunctious boy. So he gravitated to basketball after college, drawn to calling timeouts and making substitutions and changing defenses and generally ranting and raving on the sideline instead of maintaining his cool in a dugout.
Tom Penders was a basketball head coach at the college level for Tufts, Columbia, Fordham, Rhode Island, Texas, George Washington and Houston, retiring in 2010 with 649 victories and 12 Division I NCAA Tournament appearances. He is now living in Florida, watching just about every UConn basketball game on TV and listening to just about every UConn baseball game.
“Whenever I stopped at their house, it was usually during a trip to Boston or New York, when I was recruiting,” Tom Penders said. “I would stay overnight with my brother and the three boys. When it was warm in the spring, Jimmy would already have the ballfield in the backyard set up with real bases. He organized the whole game. I was the pitcher. He had all the ground rules down. I knew he was going to be a coach. I’m more than proud of what he’s done and how he does it. As my dad would always say, it’s not just about winning. It’s how you do it. You go by the rules, you don’t cut corners. That’s how my dad was and that’s how we all were. I can say that as a basketball coach, too. Everybody says all basketball coaches cheat. No, I didn’t have one little thing in my record, 36 years, really because it was, ‘What would my dad think?’ And Jimmy was raised the same way. My older brother, that’s how he was.”
‘DOING WHAT HE LOVES’
As teammates on Larry Panciera’s UConn baseball teams, Jim and Tom Penders were known for the hit and run. Jim would often bat one spot ahead of his younger brother. When he’d reach first, Tom would signal for the play by grabbing his ear or taking off his helmet.
The brothers were allowed to call it on their own through the seventh inning, they were always told. Calls made in the eighth and ninth belonged to Panciera, who was UConn coach in 1962-79. Baylock was an assistant at UConn in 1964-79 before taking over as head coach for a 24-year run. Baylock, 84, is retired but remains a volunteer coach at Eastern Connecticut, where Hank Penders, Jim’s son, is a sophomore catcher.
“You know what I love?” Baylock said. “I threw BP to Jimmy’s father in the 60’s when I was an assistant to Larry Panciera, then I threw BP to Jimmy when he played for me at UConn. Now I’m throwing BP to Jimmy’s son. That’s three generations.”
Penders’ paternal grandfather began coaching in 1931.
“So another eight years, I guess,” Penders’ father said. “If Jimmy stays around it will be 100 years and there will be quite a celebration. A hundred years of Penders coaching in the State of Connecticut.”
In 1997, Baylock hired Penders as a graduate assistant. Penders was made a full-time assistant two years later.
“Jim is the epitome of doing what he loves,” athletic director David Benedict said. “He’s in a profession where there’s a lot of opportunity to probably be more about yourself than about the kids and program and university. And Jim constantly proves, time and time again, that it’s all about his student-athletes, it’s all about the University of Connecticut, it’s all about this program.
“He could have easily left for what some people would have thought were big opportunities — certainly would have come with larger paychecks. His loyalty to his university and this state and this community, his loyalty to a program and his unyielding commitment to getting the program back to the College World Series, that is not a pipe dream. It’s not easy to run a Northeast baseball program. There’s a lot stacked against you going into the season. They just continue to find ways to be successful in what is a very challenging environment.”
The Huskies have advanced to Omaha for the College World Series five times, in 1957, 1959, 1965, 1972 and 1979. No team from the Northeast has won it since Holy Cross in 1952, when the path there, and college baseball as a whole, was wildly different.
UConn came extremely close to reaching Omaha last year, defeating host Maryland to win a regional title and coming up short in the final game of a Super Regional at Stanford.
TWO-ARMED HUG
Penders’ father attended last year’s regional at Maryland, an emotional experience.
Fifty-nine years earlier, during a 1963 UConnMaryland game, the elder Jim Penders was hit in the head with a fastball and nearly died, a blood clot later removed. After UConn’s 11-8 victory to advance, Penders ran into the stands, looking for his father.
“One of the best moments of my life,” he said. “I got a two-armed hug. He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t do the two-armed hug. And there was, ‘I love you,’ too. I know he loves me. But to hear him say it, under those circumstances, at that venue in particular, was one of the best moments of my life — to give him that moment.”
Penders’ father was on the fence about traveling with the team again this postseason.
He made the trip, though. The Huskies traveled Wednesday and open regional play Friday as the site’s No. 2 seed against No. 3 Texas Tech. Topseeded host Florida, and national tournament’s No. 2 overall season, and No. 4 Florida A&M are also in the same double-elimination regional.
“I worked on him,” Penders said. “He came to the selection show I was like you’re coming again, right? ‘No, no, no.’ Then at the evening, we were at a cookout together and I said, ‘Hey, I’m buying, you’re coming.’ He said, ‘No, no, no.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I am good luck, you know.’”
Penders said his father never wanted to pressure or coach him before he actually coached him at East Catholic. Penders remembers his father driving a blue 1977 Ford Pinto for years, a car that was hard to miss. But his father would park it behind the outfield fence for Jimmy’s youth games and, in conversation later, pretended he wasn’t paying too much attention to each at-bat.
“He kind of let me find the game on my own,” Penders said. “He would always say, ‘Have a catch with your brothers.’ It wound up benefitting all of us, because we got competitive. It’s been great to have him along for the ride, to look up into the stands as the third base coach and seeing my mom [Joan] and dad enjoying the games.”
The UConn games. Could it be any other way? Could it be anywhere else?
“I feel a great debt,” Penders said. “I still owe an awful lot to this place. My father, his brother, playing here on that ‘65 College World Series team, I got to hear all those stories growing up. Coach Baylock was at my parents’ wedding. So three years before I’m born, Coach Baylock helps my dad get the job at East Catholic. It’s unbelievable how this place has touched my life, even before I was born.”