Playwright Goes Back to Baseball

His next act will be off off off Broadway.

Bill Kernen, the coach who became a New York City playwright, is returning to college baseball and Southern California.

He will be the volunteer pitching coach at Cal State Fullerton, replacing Ted Silva, who is leaving to become the pitching coach at Fresno State.

Kernen, 58, is a former Fullerton assistant who was head coach at Cal State Northridge for seven years. He was best known for, in 1991, guiding a Northridge team in its first season of competition at the Division I level to within three outs of a place in the College World Series.

Northridge made the playoffs under Kernen in its first three Division I seasons before budget cuts and tumult in the school’s athletic program left the baseball program on the verge of being eliminated. In 1995, Kernen quit and moved to New York, where he studied at Columbia University for two years.

His credits include three full-length plays, four one-act plays and two short films. Two of his plays, “And Other Fairy Tales” and “Galleria degli Angeli” are currently in film production.

His hiring has not been announced by Fullerton, and Kernen would not confirm it Friday, but he did acknowledge an urge to return to coaching.

“I just don’t feel that my career was finished when I left,” he said by telephone. “I don’t think I fully realized it until I was away, but I know now. I have unfinished business as a coach.”

Kernen was an assistant at North Carolina State in 2002 and ’03 but left that team during his second season. That stint, he said, “was a little bit of a test to see if I still had the passion and the ability in today’s college game to be successful. I felt very strongly after that that I definitely was not finished coaching.”

Silva, 32, a former Titans pitcher, was Fullerton’s pitching coach as a volunteer the past two seasons. Fullerton went 2-2 at the College World Series this past season after being eliminated by Arizona State in a super-regional in 2005.

Fullerton was national champion in 2004.