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LSU notes: Mainieri loses pitching coach to Central Florida
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BATON ROUGE -- LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri has lost another one, but he feels like a proud father.
"When one of you assistants gets a head coaching job, it's like one of your players getting drafted or moving on to Major League Baseball," Mainieri said Thursday after learning that pitching coach Terry Rooney will be the new coach at Central Florida.
Rooney, who is also LSU's associate head coach and recruiting coordinator and was with Mainieri at Notre Dame from 2004-06 before joining him at LSU, formally accepted the job Thursday and was introduced at a press conference in the afternoon on the Central Florida campus in Orlando. But he didn't plan to be there long. He was scheduled to join the LSU team in Omaha, Neb., Thursday night for the College World Series.
The 7th-seeded Tigers (48-17-1) play No. 2 seed North Carolina (51-12) at 6 p.m. Sunday on ESPN2, and Rooney will be with the Tigers for their entire stay in Omaha before reporting for work at Central Florida.
"At 6 p.m. tonight, my wife (Shaun) and I are going to be boarding a flight from Orlando International Airport, and we are going to the place where every college baseball player and every college coach dreams of going to," Rooney said at the press conference. "That is Omaha and the College World Series. My vision, my goal and what I want to become a reality is that the next time that I board a plane heading to Omaha, Neb., I want 25 players behind me, representing the University of Central Florida and our baseball program. That is my vision. I can assure peo
TheTownTalk.com
6/13/08