They're playing a football game of some note in San Diego this weekend, but the city's most famous sports figure has a more important game several hundred miles away in Tempe, Ariz. Tony Gwynn, future Hall-of-Famer and .338 career hitter, manages his first game as the San Diego State baseball coach Friday night against Arizona State.

He doesn't need to be doing this. He earned millions during his playing career. He could be sitting in an ESPN studio and analyzing the day's games. He could be on the golf course lowering his handicap. He could be lying on the couch doing nothing. Instead, he's working full-time at his alma mater, coaching players who weren't even born when he won the first of his eight batting titles, riding the team bus, recruiting players, figuring out how to run a program on a $55,000 budget, learning the NCAA rulebook -- is it a violation to sign autographs for a recruit? -- and seeing to so many details that the day before his first road trip, he was applying school decals to the batting helmets at 6 p.m.

	Tony Gwynn, seen here during his playing days with the Padres, is in his first year as the head coach at San Diego State.

And he loves it.

"I called a lot of people when I was applying for the job and to a person, everyone I talked to said I was out of my mind,'' Gwynn said. "They said, 'You worked hard as a player. You don't need to do this. You should enjoy your retirement like everyone else does.' But I didn't want to do what everyone else does. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And this is exactly what I want to do.''

This is a wonderful thing for baseball. No player of Gwynn's magnitude has coached at the college level during the modern era of million dollar contracts. Virtually no one of Gwynn's stature did so before then, either (Hall of Famers Enos Slaughter and Smokey Joe Wood are among a very select group).

But then, Gwynn always was exceptional. And he says coaching in the majors never appealed to him because he wanted to work with younger players less set in their ways and more responsive to instruction. "I call it getting them before they get jaded.

"When I was a player I wrestled with that. I would try to imagine myself as a big league hitting coach on a Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m. and asking players if they want to take extra hitting and having them turn me down and say no. And I wouldn't be able to make them. As a hitting coach, you have credibility but you don't have authority. I would have had a hard time with guys turning me down.

"Here, if they don't think they have to show up for extra hitting, that's all right -- they don't have to play, either. They can sit next to me the whole game.''

It's occasionally said that great players do not make good coaches because they have difficulty explaining their approach to lesser talents. That won't be a problem for Gwynn. He may have had great natural talent but his success was due to his religious study of the game, the hours he spent in front of the VCR each day reviewing his swing and the hours he spent in the batting cage.

With the passing of Ted Williams, there is no one on the planet who knows more about hitting than Gwynn. He knows how to teach it (and the rest of the game as well) to others.

	“	I put a sign up in the clubhouse that says, 'The road to Omaha starts through this door.' Starting out, that can be tough for (the players) to believe because they may not see themselves as being just as good as any team in the country. But we're going to be. It may take a year. It may take three years. Or longer. But we're going to get there. ”
		— Tony Gwynn, San Diego State baseball coach

Gwynn was primarily a singles hitter, but he says he won't force that style on any player at San Diego State. "Whatever type of hitter they are, that's the type of hitter they're going to be. Only they're going to be a more consistent hitter because of what I try to teach them.''

San Diego State has never been to the College World Series and hasn't been to a regional in a dozen years, but Gwynn wants to correct that. The first thing he did was place perennial powers Arizona State and Miami on the schedule, believing that the only way the program would get better was by playing better competition. He placed a premium on recruiting the best athletes he could. He also hit up his major league contacts and upgraded the program's equipment.

There is no reason he shouldn't succeed. The San Diego State stadium that bears his name is one of the finest in college baseball, the area is loaded with talent to recruit and he has a good club with which to start. San Diego State won the Mountain West conference title last year and its center fielder is a preseason All-America who just happens to be Gwynn's son, Anthony.

"I put a sign up in the clubhouse that says, 'The road to Omaha starts through this door,' " Gwynn said. "Starting out, that can be tough for (the players) to believe because they may not see themselves as being just as good as any team in the country. But we're going to be. It may take a year. It may take three years. Or longer. But we're going to get there.''

Gwynn wants to do more than take San Diego State to Omaha, though. He wants to elevate college baseball's profile -- "College football is huge. College basketball is huge. And college baseball could be huge, too'' and he wants to bring more African-Americans into the college game. There were only two blacks in the entire conference last year, and one of them was his son.

"I'm trying to find out why,'' he said. "I go to the Area Code games and black players are everywhere. I know they're being recruited. I know they're signing with major league teams. But I don't know why there aren't more in college baseball. I ask myself that question all the time. You have to ask that question.

"Somewhere along the line, there's been a failure. I asked people at the coaches convention why there aren't more blacks and all you get is that shoulder shrug. I haven't been around long enough to know what the reason is, but I want to find out.''

In short, Gywnn wants to succeed every bit as much as a college coach as he did as a major league player, striving to be the best, working on every detail and producing an endless string of hits.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.