'The Road' less traveled

"The Road," as Brian Pensky likes to call it, probably won't include what's about to happen tonight.

Not with the seventh-year Terrapins women's soccer coach about to field a ranked team for the 51st straight game. Not with his No. 11 Terps' prime-time game against No. 13 Boston College set to be televised regionally. And certainly not with his program poised to make a third straight NCAA Tournament after having missed it the previous four years.

No, "The Road," a Microsoft Word document Pensky keeps on his cell phone, covers the infancy of his head coaching career in College Park. Those early years — a 23-39-11 overall record, including an 8-26-6 mark in the ACC, over four years at a program that had made the NCAA Tournament in nine of the previous 10 seasons — offered little foreshadowing into how he would revise an entire program's culture.

"I have written out all of the bad results that we had in my first four years," Pensky said, "and I have that as a constant reminder to myself about where we've come from."

Where Pensky's going, with a win tonight, is into the record books. A victory against the Eagles — or versus N.C. State on Sunday, or at Clemson next Thursday, or during some point in a grueling ACC schedule — will give him 63 career wins, enough to move past his predecessor, Shannon Higgins-Cirovski, and into first place on the program's all-time coaching wins list.

But for Pensky to get to where he is now, sitting right on the brink of history after an admittedly bumpy road to glory, he had to remember where he came from and what forged his destination.

SETTLING DOWN

In a society that expects quick results and sees instant gratification as a way of life, it's hard to imagine someone enjoying an "assistant" label at a mid-level program for the long haul.

But in 2001, that was Pensky's expectation. After four years as an assistant at George Washington, Pensky was lured away to Loyola by Greyhounds women's soccer coach Joe Mallia. And he just couldn't see himself leaving Baltimore.

"Joe had a little baby and my wife was pregnant with twins and we were best friends, and I thought I was going to be the assistant at Loyola forever," Pensky said. "I thought, Joe and I are going to grow up together, our kids are going to grow up together and here we are: These are our lives."

Pensky sometimes wondered — and worried — whether his career was "spinning wheels" at Loyola. But he knew that he had a great setup, that he could offer a great quality of life for his growing family. He was about to become a father, worked with a colleague he respected and coached a program on the rise. In Pensky's first and only year at the school, he helped guide Loyola to a 9-9-2 record, the MAAC Tournament Championship and an appearance in the NCAA Tournament.

Mallia, now the head coach at Loyola Marymount, looks back at the MAAC Championship final against Marist in Disney World, a 1-0 Greyhounds win, as one of his fondest memories of Pensky.

"Walking into the conference championship game next to Brian, I told him how the next three hours would embody how we would feel for the next nine months," Mallia said. "It was the beginning of a great run at Loyola."

But as one responsibility — fatherhood — began in earnest for Pensky, his other passion was about to take an unexpected turn. Not even two months after becoming a father to twins, Pensky recounted, "Sasho called."

Said Pensky: "Everything changed pretty quickly."

NEVER KNOWING

Sasho, of course, was Sasho Cirovski. When the Terrapins men's soccer coach told Pensky he wanted him on his coaching staff, Pensky couldn't say no.

"I recruited Brian to work with me because he's an extremely intelligent person and an extremely compassionate person," Cirovski said. "I knew he had the qualities to really help my program and also develop into a great coach like he is now. He's a hard worker and very quick learner. He remembers everything that happens, too. He's kind of like Rain Man."

Under the tutelage of what would soon become a College Park legend, Pensky helped coach the Terps to three ACC Championship appearances, one ACC Championship and three College Cups in three years.

Their neighbors at Ludwig Field — the Terps women's soccer team — were also enjoying a similar stretch of success under the watch of another Cirovski. Higgins-Cirovski, Sasho's wife and the women's team's coach since 1999, was in the midst of a run that saw the Terps make the NCAA Tournament in five of six years and culminate with a Sweet 16 appearance in 2004.

When Higgins-Cirovski retired unexpectedly after the 2004 season to spend time raising her family, the athletics department searched far and wide for a female coach at a top-25 program, not knowing a candidate was already in College Park.

Still, Pensky wasn't female. He wasn't even a head coach. That didn't matter to Cirovski.

"I said, ‘You need to look down on our level because you may have the best person right underneath your nose,'" Cirovski recalled.

Pensky wasn't one of the first choices for the job. In a 2005 interview with The Diamondback, then-Associate Athletic Director Troy Tucker said that "if it got to assistant coaches … Brian was the person we wanted." On May 18, 2005, the Terps made it official: Pensky was the person they got.

"I wanted to be a head coach," he said. "I just didn't know when, and certainly I didn't think it would come as quickly as it did, and I certainly didn't think it would be at this level as quickly as it did."