How Terry Rooney and John Hendry plan to work together with pitching staff at South Carolina
As Terry Rooney’s tenure begins at South Carolina, he’s going to be a very busy man. Not only will he be working with the pitching staff, but he’s also going to be on the recruiting trail quite a bit.
He knows he can handle it. After all, he’s been a head coach in the past, where he’s had his hands in every part of a program. But this time around, he’ll have some help.
With the coaching staff Paul Mainieri has put together, Monte Lee will be serving as the associate head coach/hitting coach, but he also has plenty of experience as a recruiter. Meanwhile, John Hendry will join the staff and assist with the pitchers.
“I think one of the things about individually myself has maybe been a little bit different, is most of my stops I’ve done the pitching and the recruiting,” Rooney told GamecockCentral. “And I feel like I can balance that very well. Certainly being a head coach in the past I know how to juggle everything. But point being is that to have other people assisting together all of it, I think that’s going to help the players.”
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Rooney admitted there may be times where he has to go out on the road to recruit during the season, meaning he wouldn’t be at a practice. But that’s where Hendry can step in and do the job of coaching the pitchers. And that’s why helping him develop as a coach is important.
“Coach Mainieri, we talked about that, he told me John was going to be coming on the staff and he’s got a pitching background,” Rooney said. “I said, that’s tremendous. When over half of your team is pitchers, it shouldn’t be one guy that runs the whole show.”
Hendry comes from a pitching background as he pitched for the University of Indianapolis from 2016-21. He appeared in 34 games, contributing as both starting pitcher and a reliever for the Greyhounds.
After his playing days came to an end, he started to work as an assistant in a college summer league, where he worked with pitchers. For the last three years, he was Virginia’s Director of Player Development & Scouting.
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So while he is younger, Hendry should be able to learn a great deal from a veteran like Rooney and build himself into one of the better young assistants in the country.
“I understand that tradition and all that is Carolina baseball, make no mistake about it. I mean, we’re trying to win a national championship, okay. I mean, that’s it. We’re trying to put ourselves in position to have the best pitching staff in America and put ourselves in position to win a national championship. So for me, John and I, we’re going to work at this together. I’ve already told everybody that this is a collective effort to get the best version of guys individually as we can,” Rooney said.
“If it means I have to go on the road and recruit and find a guy, hey, everybody is there, John’s there. We’re all working together to get this, so it’s never about me. It’s about the players and it’s about all of us together doing it right.”
