Gags and all, Gandolfi makes the Hall

The instant you catch on to Chuck Gandolfi's cell phone shenanigans, particularly if you've been caught by them before, you immediately feel like doing your best Homer Simpson impersonation and screaming, "D'oh!"

You've been had. Again.

The Carmel baseball coach has one of those outgoing messages that sounds like it's him on the other end. Live.

"Hello," his voice says. Then there's a pause and you say something like "Hey Chuck, it's so-and-so."

Chuck's voice says, "What's up?" Then there's another pause, at which point, of course, you begin talking ... only to be interrupted by Chuck's voice saying, "Hey, leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can." BEEP!

"D'oh!!!!!"

I talked with Chuck's wife Linda the other day and was lamenting the fact that, once again, I had forgotten about his hilarious voice mail message and had gotten tripped up.

She sympathized. A little.

"You know, here's the thing," Linda said with a laugh. "I've got to live with that every day."

Ah yes, living with a practical joker isn't always easy. And neither is playing for one.

"Coach Gandolfi is always trying to get us, he's always trying to trick us," said Jordan Sivertsen, a senior who will be a pitcher and outfielder for the Corsairs this spring. "It's pretty crazy. He'll act like he's going to throw a ball at you just so you'll flinch. He'll tell us crazy things but be serious about it, just to see how much of it we believe. Stuff like that. He likes to mess with us. He likes to joke around."

All kidding aside, though, Gandolfi likes to win baseball games, too.

And he's won a lot of them, which is why the Hall of Fame jokester will be inducted into the Illinois Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in February.

Gandolfi found out about the honor around the Thanksgiving holiday at the association's most recent meeting.

"I am very honored and I'm very flattered and this is very gratifying. But I never really wanted this right now," Gandolfi said in his best serious voice. "I've always thought that something like this could wait (until retirement). But the people on the board said, 'No, we want you in.' "

And why wouldn't they?

Gandolfi has won nearly 500 games (496-195) over his 19 years in Carmel's dugout. That's an average of 26 wins per year.

Under Gandolfi, the Corsairs have also won six East Suburban Catholic Conference championships -- more than any other team in the league -- and nine regionals. Plus, they've been downstate four times -- in 1990, 1994, 1999 and in 2004, which yielded a third place and the program's highest-ever state tournament finish.

Gandolfi has also primed 80 players for college careers -- 34 at the Division I level. Five have even gone on to play professionally.

"Chuck deserves this -- 100 percent," said former Carmel pitcher Tim Gorski, who led the Corsairs downstate in 1999, went on to play at Illinois and is now based in the western suburbs and working for IBM. "He's a great coach. Whenever I struggled at Illinois, he was right there for me, giving me tips, a new perspective.

"I just learned so much about the game from him. But I think the thing that makes him so good is that from the moment you join his program, you're part of his family and you want to play hard for him. He just really cares about his players and you wind up developing such a close relationship with him."

Gorski is one of dozens of former Carmel players who feel such a strong allegiance to Gandolfi that they religiously come back to the school in the summers to help him run his camps for kids.

But then again, Gandolfi is popular any time of year.

"Everyone wants to come back to see Chuck -- at homecoming, whenever," Gorski said. "Now that I'm working, I don't get back up (to Mundelein) as much, but when I do, one of the first people I call -- besides my parents -- is Chuck.

"He's just a really fun guy to hang out with. He's always joking around, and it's great to talk baseball with him, too. He's got such a passion for the game. He just lives and breathes baseball."

The 52-year-old Gandolfi has been doing that for as long as he can remember.

He grew up in Mundelein and played football, basketball and baseball for the hometown Mustangs. He then played second base for two years at Illinois State, where he majored in education.

He returned home in 1978 and was hired to teach drafting for part of the year at Mundelein High School. A year later, he got a job teaching physical education in the Round Lake school system.

He has stayed in that district ever since and has been teaching exclusively at Beach Elementary School since 1984.

For six years early in his career in Round Lake, Gandolfi was the assistant baseball coach at the high school. And when the head coaching job opened up one year, he jumped at the chance to apply.

But Gandolfi was passed over, and was devastated.

"I used to hang out with my friends at this local sporting goods store back then and I knew some guys who knew some people at Carmel and Carmel was looking for a baseball coach," Gandolfi said. "It turned out that the guys at Carmel asked me if I wanted to apply. I didn't get the Round Lake thing and I still really wanted to be a head coach, but I turned them down. Carmel and Mundelein were such big rivals back then and I didn't think I could coach at Carmel. I mean, I went to Mundelein."

Not long after, Gandolfi was asked again by the Carmel athletic director if he wanted to apply for the baseball job, which still hadn't been filled. Again, Gandolfi's answer was no.

"Then one day, I was back in the sporting goods store and these two big kids walked in," Gandolfi said. "And my friends were like, 'Too bad you didn't take that job at Carmel. Those two kids would have been your starting pitchers.' Well, these guys looked like horses."

So Gandolfi went back over to Carmel and asked if the coaching position had been filled yet. It had not.

Gandolfi was immediately tabbed the Corsairs' coach for the 1989 season.

That year, behind the two horses from the sporting goods store -- Eric Maloney and Shawn Chambers -- Carmel started the season with 26 straight wins and was ranked in the top 10 nationally by USA Today.

"All I have to say is that I'm very thankful the job never got filled," Gandolfi said with a laugh. "The kids on that first team were pretty awesome. And it seemed like everything that needed to go right that year did -- until it all came crashing down in the playoffs and we lost to Libertyville in the sectional.

"But that was the start of a lot of great years."

Since then, Carmel has continued to produce horses like Maloney and Chambers. But Gandolfi says that there's another reason the program has been consistently successful.

His staff has stayed remarkably stable over the last two decades. Two of his coaches have been particularly loyal.

Volunteer Greg Krebs has coached with Gandolfi at Carmel since Day 1 and assistant Bill Taylor has been on the staff for the last 15 years.

"Chuck is just an easy guy to work for," Taylor said. "He doesn't treat any of his assistants like assistants. He lets them coach. And he's so appreciative. When he found out about this nomination, he called every single coach who has ever coached in the program to thank them personally. And that's a lot of calls. We've got 13 guys in the program right now alone."

Wonder how many of those coaches tried to call him back and got tripped up by his voice mail.