John Cohen takes pride in Kentucky's first College World Series appearance

There’s a story John Cohen likes to tell about his first Christmas in Lexington before the 2004 season. Cohen, now the athletic director at Auburn University, attended a neighborhood Christmas party with his wife, Nelle, about 10 minutes from Kentucky’s former home at Cliff Hagan Stadium.

“I just popped in there real quick,” Cohen told Bat Cats Central. “It was ‘Hey, John, what do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m the new baseball coach at Kentucky.’ And I swear, without blinking, this woman looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘We have a baseball team at Kentucky?’ That was my intro.”

Cohen informed the woman, who said she was born and raised in Lexington, that Kentucky had been playing baseball for quite a while by then. But during the following years, two important things happened: Cohen and his staff proved Kentucky, with added investment from athletic director Mitch Barnhart, could be a winner on the baseball diamond, and the coach who would eventually lead the program to its first College World Series stepped foot on campus for the first time.