White River Junction — Nick Cenatiempo was looking for his next coaching opportunity. He thought he found it with Noah Crane’s Laconia Muskrats after the Laconia GM promoted the Manchester native to manager from pitching coach last summer. Little did he know that was just the beginning.

Cenatiempo, in his first week as the manager of the Upper Valley Nighthawks, is coming off his first season as the pitching coach at SUNY Cortland (N.Y.), a perennial NCAA Division III baseball powerhouse. He was handpicked for the job in the middle on an NECBL game last summer by Vermont Mountaineers — and SUNY Cortland — head coach Joe Brown.

It’s a situation Cenatiempo still found ironic this week.

“We were in the third-base dugout with the visitors, he was going to third base. He asked me if I was available, if I was looking for jobs,” Cenatiempo said on Tuesday. “I said, ‘I’m open. I’ve been looking.’ He said, ‘I have my head assistant job open. I’ll talk to you after the game.’”

Just like that, Cenatiempo’s coaching career changed dramatically.

Brown has coached the Red Dragons to 16 NCAA D-III tournament appearances, nine College World Series showings and nine SUNY Athletic Conference titles in 16 years with the team, accumulating a 598-156-3 record. Brown also has coached the Mountaineers for four years, winning an NECBL championship last season.

A chance to learn from one of the best was a chance Cenatiempo couldn’t pass up, though having two NECBL coaches with desks next to each other was, admittedly, an odd setup.

“Once I got there in the fall, he started flashing his ring around because he beat us (Laconia) in the first round,” Cenatiempo said. “I was like, okay. Then he would wear his Vermont hoodie around. Then he was telling recruits how he beat us. He was telling the players how he beat us. He would tell them how our (Laconia) starting pitcher Tim Viehoff (Southern New Hampshire) made three errors in a playoff game and how the box score was we had 12 hits and they had four hits, and they beat us by 10 runs. He would brag about it.”

Before the Nighthawks’ first game Wednesday at Vermont, Cenatiempo and Brown met behind home plate and talked for several minutes as Upper Valley went through its warm-ups. But Brown’s relationship with the Nighthawks coach goes back further than just an in-game meeting.

“I coached him in 2005 when we won the NECBL championship in Sanford, Maine,” Brown said after his Mountaineers defeated the Nighthawks 2-0 in the visitors’ league debut. “He has this toughness about him. He had a successful career at St. John’s. I asked him, ‘Can you please talk to your boss? I don’t want to do anything unethical.”

Cenatiempo pitched four seasons with the Red Storm in college, earning a bachelor’s degree in sports management in 2010. He then went back home to join St. Anselm College as a head assistant coach before getting the call to join Brown’s staff.

Crane brought plenty with him when he left the Muskrats to start the Nighthawks from scratch, tabbing Cenatiempo as the team’s first manager as early as late last summer. There were other offers on the table from other NECBL teams that wanted his services. But Cenatiempo’s relationship with Crane has flourished in the past year, a dichotomy of personalities that, he said, complement each other nicely.

“Working for (Crane) previously, you see how hard he works and how he wants it to run so well,” Cenatiempo said. “You really want to deliver for him. I’ve said this before, you want to win for the kids for them to be able to enjoy a championship experience and for the town, but you want to reward people that work hard.

“The thing is, you’re able to have conversations with someone who knows the game. (Crane) played the game. He’s been around, a little bit. You can have a simple conversation and he knows the struggles, he knows what types of things you need to do as a manager in this league. He lets me do my job, but also we have a relationship where I can have his opinion on things because he knows the game. … He lets our coaches coach. He’s almost a player’s manager in a GM position. He gets it. He’s in it for the right reasons.”

Cenatiempo said that coaching an expansion team certainly increases the outside pressure; a new team, when winning or losing, gets overly emphasized. But he also knows he’s in a good situation: a compatible GM, a roster with potential and a new perspective on the job has helped shape his mindset heading into Upper Valley’s inaugural season.

That, and being able to play seven games against his SUNY Cortland employer, certainly adds to Cenatiempo’s motivation to win.

“I haven’t managed against him yet,” he said on Tuesday before the Nighthawks opening game. “I don’t know how it’s going to be like. Am I looking forward to it? No. Because I just coached 51 games with him, stayed in a hotel with him, roomed with him. My desk is next to his.”

Cenatiempo and his Nighthawks will gets its second crack at Vermont tonight in Upper Valley’s inaugural home opener at Maxfield Sports Complex. Game time is 6:30 p.m.

Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or at 603-727-3306.