NDL Forum

DRiccio21 wrote:UConn won the big east tourney. pretty cool. we've had some amazing teams the last 5-8 yrs and made a bunch of finals but this is the first one they've won since I believe 1994.

the coach now, who is the guy who recruited me Jim Penders (yes, that Penders family) won his 1st title. very cool for him.

they are Va Tech's region with Coastal Carolina and OU.

not expecting much as they are a #4 seed but they're playing well now.

tball275 wrote:Well, anyone ever been to Corvallis? We will be heading up there on Wednesday.

Interesting story -- The NCAA sets up your travel for this tournament and we have a chartered flight out of Austin. Texas A&M and Rice also will be on the plane since we are all going to Oregon. A&M is in the same regional we are and Rice is going to Eugene.

I've never been to Oregon, so this should be fun.

By DOM AMORE, damore@courant.comThe Hartford Courant
8:20 p.m. EDT, May 28, 2013

STORRS ——

Nearly every day, before the UConn baseball team practices, coach Jim Penders can be seen running through the back roads surrounding the campus.

It's a feeling one of Penders' closest friends, Mike Galati, has not had in a long while.

"I told Jim, it's like I'm walking uphill into a 30 mile an hour wind," Galati says.

Penders and Galati were UConn teammates, catcher and pitcher, in 1994, the last time the Huskies won the Big East championship. As Penders enjoys the 2013 championship, at the apex of a college coach's career, he is readying himself to help Galati live a long, healthy life.

Penders missed practice Tuesday, as his team prepared for the NCAA Tournament, which begins at Virginia Tech on Friday. He was in Yale-New Haven with Galati, where continued tests were run to see if Penders is a match to donate part of his liver. They hope to find out sometime next week if it's a go, but as of Tuesday it looked good.

"Just the fact that someone is willing to donate is humbling," Galati says, "but Jim is excited about it. He was happy, excited when he found out he could be a match. It tells you all you need to know about what kind of person Jim is, what kind of family he comes from."

Galati, 37, who was an All-State player at Southington High, has primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a disease that causes inflammation of the bile ducts inside and outside the liver. He began having problems with his liver, he said, when he was a freshman in high school, but overcame it to pitch. After turning 30, PSC was diagnosed.

It's a slow moving disease, Galati says, but it has progressed to the point where doctors have told him he was unlikely to get a cadaver's liver in time; he needed to find a live donor to survive. Penders helped put the word out through UConn's website during this past season, and former teammates from the Cape Cod League did the same. Soon there was a sizable pool of willing candidates.

Penders and his wife, Brooke, the parents of three young children, both filled out questionaires to begin the process of determining if they were viable matches. "When your wife fills out the questionnaire before you do," Penders said, "and when she finds out she's not a match, tells them to keep her name on the list in case she's a match for someone else, you know you picked right."

Jim, however, eventually learned that he could be a match, and as his team flew to Clearwater, Fla., on May 21 for the Big East tournament, he stayed back a day to begin blood tests, CT scans and MRIs.

"I never miss a practice," Penders said, "but when one of your teammates needs you, you better be there for him. I preach that to my players all the time, so I better live up to it myself."

If Penders is a match, he will have 40 percent of his liver removed, but his liver will regenerate. He will be in intensive care for a couple of days, and in the hospital four to seven days. The recovery process is three to four months.

"This is all about Mike," Penders said, "for him to go on and live a long, healthy life. It's no sacrifice on my part. My motivation is, I believe one of my teammates would do it for me."

Teammate are teammates, though. When they walked out of the meeting with surgeons on Tuesday, Penders turned to Galati and joked, "I wouldn't be doing this if you didn't win us a championship."

The biggest obstacle is the anatomy of the liver. Galati, 6 feet 4, and Penders, 6-1, are similar in size, and the size and shapes of their liver seem to match up.

"And Jim is in great shape, healthy as an ox, eats right," Galati said.

Galati was a "freshman pheenom" for UConn, Penders recalls. He threw a great, sinking fastball for the Huskies and, during the 1994 Big East tournament in Bristol, he took the ball on short rest and shut out Seton Hall, a team that had hit him hard during the season, to get UConn to the final. This Sunday, Galati watched as his former batterymate became the first to win a Big East baseball title as a player and a coach.

"I was excited," Galati said. "It brought me back to that feeling we had 19 years ago, like we were on top of the world. We were the last team to get in, and we had nothing to lose. Jim was a leader, a leader by example. He was always calm, in control. You knew then he had what it takes to be a great coach. You see coaches leave schools for more money, leave at midnight without saying goodbye to their players, schools leaving conferences for a money grab. Jim is what's right with college athletics, all about his program and his players, and loyal to his school."

The Huskies practiced without their head coach, at J.O. Christian Field on Tuesday. They will fly together Wednesday to Blacksburg, Va., where they will play Virginia Tech on Friday at 5:30 p.m.

Galati, who works as a medical devices sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, is rooting for Penders and the Huskies to go on to the College World Series later this month, even though that could delay the liver transplant process. Once the surgeries and recoveries are done, Galati and Penders want to develop programs to raise awareness of organ donor programs. Maybe, soon, they will be able to go out for a run.

"I want to be able to go for a run and not feel winded, and feel that runner's high and say to myself, 'This is what normal feels like.'"

DRiccio21 wrote:UConn knocked off Virginia Tech.

only #4 seed to beat a #1 so far.

LetsGoPeay wrote:Hoosiers beat Valpo and The Peay tops Florida. Hoosiers vs The Peay tomorrow.

bearass wrote:OU beat Coastal Carolina, looks like a showdown with dave tomorrow.