He's never been to Haymarket, he's never seen a Senators game and he's never been the head coach for baseball team.

Going into this week, Justin Aspegren never even met the Senators' owners, the players or the hosts of the local Valley Baseball League club.

Yet the 27-year-old from California is set to take over the reins for departed coach Ryan Fecteau as the manager for the Senators this summer season in the wooden bat league designed for NCAA athletes in between the spring and fall semesters.

"I knew that Haymarket had been a successful team for the last two summers," said Aspegren during a Monday phone interview. "Also I had a couple of players in the Cape Code (Baseball) League that spoke very highly of the league."

The fourth-year pitching coach for Santa Barbara City College in California is also a former assistant coach for the Brewster Whitecaps of the CCBL. He said he found out about the open position in Haymarket once Fecteau decided that he would not be able to commit fully to both the Senators and his new positions as a recruiting coordinator and assistant coach for the Bryant University baseball team.

Fecteau led Haymarket to the VBL tournament championship in 2009 and the regular season title in 2010 after taking over for the previously struggling program.

Aspegren comes to Haymarket with a loaded resume from his own time as a player. At Justin-Siena High School, he hit .447 as a senior while also collecting an 8-0 record with an 0.86 ERA as a pitcher, tossing his school's first-ever no-hitter in 2002 according to the University of California-Santa Barbara Web site.

Four years later, as a summer ball pitcher with the Santa Barbara Foresters, his 1.47 ERA and 17 strikeouts in 18.1 innings pitched helped the Foresters capture the 2006 NBC World Series National Championship and a spot at the top of the national rankings.

At Santa Barbara City College, he earned back-to-back appearances to the All-Western States Conference Team while playing a big role in his team's 24-15 record in 2005. The school's Web site states that he helped end the team's 27-year playoff drought.

As a coach, he said his own philosophy, "especially at the beginning of the year, is getting (the players) rest and creating an environment where they want to come in and do their work.

"That's kind of the goal," Aspegren added. "It's got to be focused on teaching. We need to be available to them. ... There needs to be a level of accountability but it needs to be fun too."

Aspegren is set to arrive in town on May 27 and will join pitching coach Nate Klein as leaders of the ball team that returns four players from last year: outfielders Sean Lyons and Jimmy Dowdell and left-handed pitchers Jason Boyer and Grant Sasser.

At 24 years old, Klein is fresh out of college and working on his master's degree, according to Aspegren. Klein pitched at Santa Barbara during Aspegren's first season as an assistant coach and became an assistant coach for the team after graduating.

"There's a lot of fight in him," said the coach, later adding, "Nate's going to be a great coach some day so I want to give him that opportunity."

Fecteau recruited the roster for the 2011 squad before he resigned his post and discussed players with Aspegren, giving the rookie coach a head's-up entering the season.

"I'm really excited about the collection of guys that Ryan put together," said Aspegren, calling them "productive, top-of-the-line-up hitters."

He declined to pick out any individuals he found particularly exciting as to not play favorites before the season begins, but he said that winning another title with this line up "might be something we can continue."

Aspegren decided that if Fecteau could effectively manage a winning team with a two-man coaching staff, then it would be okay to give it a shot himself after a couple failed attempts at bringing on a batting coach.

"On a team level, first, obviously, everything's more fun when you're winning ball games. If we can continue the success that Coach Fecteau started two years ago... that's always more fun," he said. "The team goals are always centered around the individual kids in the summer."

Personally, the coach said he hopes his performance with Haymarket can help propel him up the coaching ranks out of city college, where it's "kind of the only level where the goal is not to be back the next year."

For now though, Aspegren explained that rather than be concerned with wins and losses, "I think that's kind of selfish in the summer because they will take care of themselves if the kids are up on what they're doing."