Ya probably done heard already - sorry, I've been finals-ed out, just got finished taking two back to back - but Northwestern has brought on former Rutgers Scarlet Knights head coach Fred Hill to replace Mitch Henderson as an assistant coach. THE MAN WHO VERY NEARLY COACHED QUINCY DOUBY. The move is motivated most likely to boost NU's baseball's decided home field advantage at Rocky Miller Park, for reasons you either know or I'll explain.
Where we lost one assistant to be a head coach in New Jersey - Henderson's now at Princeton - we gained a former head coach of a school in New Jersey, though wayyyy down the turnpike.
Hill's tenure at Rutgers was a rocky one, to say the least: a year after the school lost Douby to a very brief NBA career, Hill took over with his first head coaching gig after over 20 years of being an assistant at various D-I institutions. Under his tenure, the Scarlet Knights were cellar-dwellers in the Big East, never finishing above 14th in the monstrously difficult Big East conference, meaning the team only made appearances in the Big East tournament once it expanded to 16 teams in 2009. His best season was a 15-17, 5-13 campaign in his last year. He was able to recruit an all-American, the first in school history, in Mike Rosario, but Rosario transferred to Florida to play for Billy Donovan.
So, not good. But the defining characteristic of his career came after the end of the 2010 season, when he went to watch his dad, Fred Hill, Sr., coach the Rutgers baseball team. However, somewhere along the line, he ended up getting infuriated at Pittsburgh baseball coach Joe Jordano, unleashing a profanity-laced tirade (journalists' note: can people ever have non-profanity laced tirades? Can we start lacing our tirades with other stuff?) after a tough call at first, and, uh, yeah, they can fire you for doing that.
He'll primarily be useful off the bat as a recruiter, as that was one of the things he did well at Rutgers, as opposed to winning games or not asking the ump what game he's watching.
So that's Fred Hill. We'll talk more about him soon, but for now, be afraid, opposing baseball coaches of the Big Ten. I SEE YOU DARIN ERSTAD.