After the Georgia Bulldogs completed the worst baseball season in school history, David Perno fired Brady Wiederhold and personally took charge of coaching the Diamond Dog pitchers. To fill the vacancy this left on the baseball staff, Coach Perno hired Wingate head baseball coach Allen Osborne to serve as the Red and Black's hitting instructor and third base coach.
Coach Osborne earned a master of education degree from the University of Georgia while serving as a graduate assistant under Robert Sapp in the late 1990s, then he returned to Athens as a volunteer assistant coach under Ron Polk in 2000. Coach Osborne remained in the Classic City for the first season of Coach Perno's stewardship of the program in 2002 before serving stints as an assistant coach at East Carolina (from 2003 to 2005), Wakefield High School (in 2006), and Memphis (in 2007).
Since taking over as the head coach of the Wingate Bulldogs in 2008, Coach Osborne has taken his team to the South Atlantic Conference tournament each season, finally winning the league tourney in 2010 to give Wingate its first conference tournament title in a decade.
Coach Osborne sounded excited to return to Georgia to work for Coach Perno, who coached him as a player at Marshall in the early 1990s. Frankly, I had hoped Coach Perno would hire a big-name pitching coach rather than bring in an assistant with whom he has prior history, but Coach Perno has earned the benefit of the doubt, and the baseball program seems to be one of the few areas of Georgia athletics in which hiring coaches with previous ties to the program is not a recipe for disaster, so I will keep my doubts in check and simply welcome Allen Osborne home.
Go 'Dawgs!