Gainesville on Tuesday announced the hiring of former major league pitchers and alumni Cris Carpenter and Micah Owings to run the baseball program.
Carpenter will be the baseball coach, and Owings will be director of baseball operations. Carpenter was Gainesville’s pitching coach when Owings led Gainesville to state titles in 2001 and 2002.
Carpenter also is a former University of Georgia punter and one of Gainesville’s historically best all-around athletes. In his junior season of 1982-83, Carpenter was the quarterback on Gainesville’s state runner-up football team, the point guard on a state-winning basketball team and pitcher on a region-winning baseball team.
An All-American relief pitcher at Georgia, Carpenter was a first-round MLB draft pick in 1987 and played eight seasons in the majors, mostly with the St. Louis Cardinals.
Owings pitched at Georgia Tech and Tulane, leading the latter to the College World Series, and had a six-year major league career. He was one of the better hitting pitchers in major league history, batting .283 for his career, and hit a state-record 25 home runs for Gainesville as a senior.
His best major league game came against the Braves on Aug. 18, 2007. Playing for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Owings pitched seven innings, allowing three hits and three runs, and went 4-for-5 at the plate with two home runs, six RBI and four runs scored. Arizona won 12-6.
“This isn’t about bringing in two former professional athletes so our student-athletes can learn what it takes to play at that level,” Gainesville athletic director Adam Lindsey said. “This is about bringing in two former Red Elephant athletes who are going to instill what it takes to play to the level of excellence on which Gainesville baseball built its reputation.”
Gainesville’s baseball team was 13-15 this past season and failed to make the playoffs out of Region 6-6A.
These are the latest of several hires at Gainesville in the past two years. New football coach Josh Niblett led Gainesville to the Class 6A championship game last fall after the program had gone seven years without a playoff victory. Gainesville hired Newton boys basketball coach Charlemagne Gibbons, who previously won multiple state titles at Morgan County, this offseason.
Vanessa White was hired as girls basketball coach in the spring of 2022, and Jason DeJiacomo was hired as boys golf coach last fall.
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