Staff photo by TOM KING New Campbell baseball coach gives instruction to players such as William McPherson during the opening week of practice for the Cougars.

LITCHFIELD – There was a moment earlier this week when Jim Cardello knew he had made the right decision.

The new Campbell High School head varsity baseball coach was starting to wonder at his first indoor practice when the team would be able to start things outside.

“I’m looking forward to getting through the indoor practices now and getting outdoors,” he said. “But I was wondering. That was a key for me. If I wasn’t anxious to get outside, if I wasn’t anxious to get through the indoors then I would know I wasn’t that excited about (the job). So this is great. … Every day that gets closer to the first game, I’ll get more and more excited about it.”

And so a new era of Campbell baseball begins – finally. The school thought it had a successor for the only coach the program had ever had, the retired Jim Gorham, but that candidate – widely believed to be former Nashua North coach Will Henderson – opted to not take the job a month or two ago.

Gulp. And thus the search opened again. Cardello, the former Daniel Webster College head coach who 20 year ago was a Nashua Pride third base coach and operations director, didn’t initially apply for the Cougar position. But when his son, James, a senior outfielder told him in February that there still wasn’t a coach, he began thinking about applying.

“From the community standpoint if they needed it, I bring a lot of experience, so I think I would have still been interested,” Cardello, a longtime Litchfield resident, said when asked if he might have applied even if his son were not on the team.

After accepting the job a couple of weeks ago, Cardello, who turns 50 next month, went out and put a staff together to help out. His right hand man appears to be former DWC player Chris Shanahan and former longtime Eagle assistant Mike Henzley. Also, he’s added a few people from the Litchfield youth leagues.

Cardello’s intent was to involve as many minds, especially local ones, as possible to help keep the program on course. He knows first-hand how successful Gorham was with four state titles.

“It’s a strong history, and a strong recent history,” Cardello said. “So I hope at the end of the day, I don’t screw it up. But I hope the kids feel like they’ve gotten something different.”

And he knows that’s imperative because lacrosse everywhere is a draw that cuts into baseball, and the numbers are very much on his mind.

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The irony here is that Cardello, who played baseball at Londonderry High School back in the mid-1980s and eventually at Southern New Hampshire University (when it was New Hampshire College), has been known the last 10 years or so as a girls/women’s softball guy.

He had coached baseball at New Hampshire Technical Institute for a year, then was a college assistant at a couple of spots and then was the head man at New England College for a couple of years before he joined the Pride. “That was my dream job right there,” Cardello said of his year with the Pride and then-manager Mike Easler. “I made enough money to live on it, but not start a family.”

So after he left the Pride, he got the Daniel Webster job in the early 2000s after being out of baseball for awhile. But he wasn’t able to commit the time to recruit at DWC as he was beginning a real estate career. When the school made it a full time job, with his second career he was deemed not to be a good fit by the administration the new heavy recruiting philosophy by school VP Phil Rowe. Thus he stepped away.

“We didn’t win a lot,” he said. “I loved coaching baseball, but it was a tough situation. … There weren’t enough players to play. It was a hard job. Guys didn’t go there for baseball. They were there and just happened to play baseball. It was frustrating.”

Of course that eventually changed at DWC, but Cardello had moved on. He actually ended up coaching a team out of Nashua in the North American Baseball League, as he got to know former Pride general manager Robin Wallace when she was looking to secure Harvey Woods Field at DWC for a couple of women’s league games.

Then softball beckoned earlier this decade. One of the players on his women’s team was coaching at Tufts, and he signed on as an assistant.

“It was a new start,” he said. “I still wanted to be a full time head coach somewhere, and I felt if I can have the experience in both sports, it would lead somewhere.”

He got hooked on the sport, and also how much quicker the games were compared to baseball. In one of his first games, he was coaching a softball doubleheader that was done in two-and-a-half hours. “After that,” he said, “I didn’t think I’d ever come back to baseball again. … I thought softball was the best thing that ever happened to me at that point.”

He was at Tufts for a couple of years, then UMass-Lowell, and then actually was the head softball coach at Nashua High School South for a year. Then he ended up getting the head job at Merrimack College, but at that time it wasn’t a full time gig. He coached the Warriors for a couple of seasons (2013-14). And then he’s been coaching travel team softball (ASA), and has been know in town mainly as a softball guy.

Now he makes the transition back to coaching males from years of guiding females.

“There were no egos (in softball) that you deal with in baseball,” Cardello said. “You don’t seem to get anybody who knows it all on the softball diamond, but you do on the baseball diamond. But that’s fine. But it was more fun to feel that I was sharing knowledge (with the girls).

“But I love baseball. But from the time it takes to play the games, I thought I’d be in softball forever. So it’s a little surprising I’m back in baseball.”

And thus Cardello is hoping to be seen as a baseball guy now.

“I had some angst (before the first practice),” he said. “I was thinking, ‘What if these guys look at me and say why is he coaching us, he’s a softball coach?’ The softball team was practicing and every one of them I coached at one time or another (in travel ball). It’s a small town.

“But I didn’t get any of that.”

“He’s a Litchfield guy, and that helps,” volunteer assistant Mike Henzley said. “He’s been out of baseball but he still follows baseball. I know he wanted to get back in. He talked about it here and there.

“When I coached with him a decade ago, he’s a pretty sharp guy. He’s already talked with the boys about the philosophy he has for the season. He has a plan.”

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At Londonderry and in college, Cardello was mainly a third baseman, sometimes a shortstop. His college baseball career had all sorts of twists and turns, one of which may have resulted in establishin an NCAA rule, believe it or not.

He tried to walk on at Broward Community College in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., a noted baseball factory. But that didn’t work out. Then one day he and a friend walked right across the street to a new NAIA school that was starting called Nova Univerity, now Nova Southeastern University.

“We heard kids were trying out for the Nova team,” Cardello said, and he made it and actually played against Broward – even though he was a student there – during a fall season. But he didn’t play during the spring.

When he came back north and wound up at New Hampshire College, he was told by then-coach Bruce Joyce (also a Londonderry alum) that a rule was created to relieve any gray area concering elgibility for players who followed Cardello’s unorthodox path.

“It was funny, when I became the head coach at Merrimack, I started digging into the rules,” he said. “The eligibility rule was that you had to have a certain number of credits if you had played at a previous school. But I hadn’t taken any classes there. But I did take classes at Broward. So the rule was if you had played a non-traditional season and didn’t earn any credits, but earned them at another institution, then you were OK.”

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What kind of coach is Jim Cardello?

“I think I’m a players coach,” Cardello said. “But from an in-game standpoint, I have an aggressive style. I don’t mind letting coaches know what they’re up against when they play us. We’re going to be running, we’re going to be hitting and running, squeezing, and being aggressive. We’re going to make the other teams beat us. … We’re going to do what we need to do to put pressure on the other teams.”

Perhaps his biggest baseball influence has been his high school coach, Mike Usenia, who won a couple of titles at Londonderry but eventually left coaching well over 25 years ago to also go into the real estate business.

“Mike had such a profound impact on me as a student and an athlete,” Cardello said. “I guess I would say he started my path on staying in baseball for a long time. He was just good. He knew how to coach. Just a good guy to be around.”

Ironically, Cardello really didn’t attend many Campbell baseball games. James was a swing player last year between varsity and JV. Plus his daughter Haleigh has been playing softball at Eastern Connecticut State so his wife Cheryl would go to the Campbell games and he’d go see their daughter play. But he has no angst about coaching his son, with whom he checked to see if were all right with him if he took the Cougars job.

“I’m kind of happy he’s the coach,” James said. “Plus I talked with my sister and she (is on board with it). He’s a good coach.”

“It’s going to be fine,” he said. “I purposely didn’t coach him (in youth ball) up to a certain point because I didn’t want him to think he had to be a baseball player.”

And same with his daughter. Now, he will take over for a coach (Gorham) who was definitely old school, and it worked.

“He left with 13 seniors and seven starters,” Cardello said. “So I don’t know what I’m walking into. Two remaining starters from last year’s varsity team. … But there’s some talent. And varsity and JVs mostly practiced together, so they understood what the program was with coach Gorham.”

The program with Cardello may be a bit less old school, perhaps with the kinder, gentler, open approach mixed in. But time will tell, and it will be an adjustment for all.

“Three years of knowing Coach Gorham, he’s a good guy,” Campbell senior Nick Boucher said. “And Mr. Cardello, I’ve been friends with his son for awhile. And they all (the coaches) seem like a good group of guys. We’ve got six or seven coaches helping out, which is fantastic. I’m excited to see how it goes and we’ll give it everything we have.”

Will Cardello be in the job long-term?

It’s way too soon to tell.

“I want to be a part of the community,” he said. “I’ve been part of the community in many ways, not necessarily as a coach, and I think I like that down the road. But circumstances change, you never know what’s going to happen.

“But for a program standpoint, I definitely want to make a mark on it, a sustainable program that can continue to feed from the lower levels in town, and have the kids be excited what they’re coming to.”

What they’re coming to is a new era for Campbell baseball.

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