Marriage has good game plan

They have been married nearly three years, with their anniversary coming up in August, but if you go by the actual time that Jamie Pinzino and Cheryl Milligan have spent together, they are still very much newlyweds.

Such is the life of a couple wed to coaching as well as one another.

Pinzino is the head coach of the Bryant University baseball team and Milligan is the bench boss for the Tufts softball team. Both earned Coach of the Year honors this season, Pinzino in the Northeast-10 and Milligan in the New England Small College Athletic Conference.

They played down the individual awards, though, saying the team accomplishments were most satisfying. Pinzino said his honor was possible only because of his players.

"That's the ultimate team award because of how they played this year and how they achieved above and beyond expectations," said Pinzino, whose squad finished 35-24. "It's certainly nice to be recognized by the other coaches."

Milligan, whose team went 31-13, said she had known two days about the award before she told her husband.

"To me, it's not really a big deal," said Milligan, who won for the second time in three years. "I'd much rather take a win than a Coach of the Year award, but it's nice to be recognized by your peers."

Both coaches got their teams as far as the NCAA regionals, with Bryant eliminated by Franklin Pierce and Tufts falling to Rhode Island College.

Pinzino said the Bulldogs came a long way from last season, when they went 18-33 in his first year at the helm.

"We were certainly happy with the progress we made this year," he said. "We didn't have a lot coming back. We had lost a lot of our seniors. We hadn't had a great year last year and we were really young. People didn't know what to expect.

"We were picked sixth in the league at the beginning of the year and we ended up finishing third and we made the conference tournament finals as well as the regional finals, losing to Franklin Pierce in both of those cases. We certainly achieved more than a lot of people thought we could this year."

On the other hand, Tufts has been a contender for years. This season, Milligan's fourth, the Jumbos had four players on the All-Conference team, the most of any school.

"We had a couple of key injuries throughout the year, and obviously the final weekend was disappointing because we thought we might go a little further than that, but you've got to show up and do it on the field," said Milligan. "Overall, we had a good season; it was a little disappointing in the end. We had a lot of players step up when some players got injured."

Pinzino said life at their home in Marlborough has been easier with the programs more or less on equal footing.

"One of the best parts about this season is they've been a good program for a while now but last year at Bryant and the year before when I was at Assumption, we struggled," he said. "Usually, I was coming home after losing a game and she had won, so that made it tough.

"This was a good experience. There were a lot of nights when we both won games. That made for a little bit happier nights."

Pinzino, 32, and Milligan, 34, met when they were undergraduates at Tufts. She was playing softball and Pinzino was playing baseball. They met at a baseball/softball slow-pitch game. Pinzino's dream was to coach but Milligan fell into it. Now they share that passion.

"I took more of a winding road," said Milligan. "I got into coaching when I was working on my masters at Tufts. For Jamie, that's what he wanted to do. For me, I was kind of headed down a different road. It was the right choice at the time and it's still the right choice. It's like having 22 kids in a one-room house."

Pinzino said the fact they are both coaches definitely has helped the relationship.

"One of the tough things about coaching is the grind of the season and the time that it takes," he said. "From my standpoint, that's one of the great things about having Cheryl. She understands what I'm going through. It works out great from my end."

Now that their seasons are over, another busy period is just beginning. For the bulk of the summer, the two will be apart, scouting the region for recruits. They will watch a multitude of games and tournaments, with an eye toward landing future players.

It's just another part of the job, one that both accept.

"It's about quality of time," said Milligan. "We don't have a lot of quantity of time. We try to make the time that we have together count."