Tony Lombardi held his first meeting as the new baseball coach at Cedar Rapids Washington Tuesday and a 6-foot-4 lefthander with a 90 mph fastball and sweet swing showed up.

That lanky southpaw is A.J. Puk, the same A.J. Puk who left Lombardi's football team this past August to concentrate on baseball and play for a travel team.

Lombardi wants Puk and all the other top athletes at Washington to play baseball, have fun, enjoy some success and revive the program after two losing campaigns.

Puk is being recruited by some of the top college baseball programs in the country. He could play baseball for the Warriors next season or he could stick with travel ball. Maybe he could do both, like Dakota Freese did this past season.

"I'd love to have A.J.," Lombardi said. "There's not a better kid on the planet. He's the nicest kid. So hopefully he wants to play for us. That would be great."

Lombardi, 49, played baseball in high school and was a member of the baseball program at Arizona State University when Barry Bonds was playing for the Sun Devils. Lombardi left the baseball program during his second year on campus to concentrate on being a football player at ASU.

He's coached the freshman baseball team at Washington and would like to help revive the overall program. The Warriors made the state tournament and finished 32-9 in 2009, but they slipped to 11-25 in 2010 and finished 16-22 this past season.

Washington had a tumultuous start to the 2011 campaign when coach Byron Schlotterbach was granted a leave of absence on the second day of practice and ultimately resigned. Brent Henry served as interim head coach during the season, and on Tuesday the school announced Lombardi as the new head coach.

"Coach Lombardi will give us an in-building coach to lead the baseball program," Washington athletic director Paul James said in a press release. "He will provide a great deal of energy, leadership and winning tradition as he builds the numbers in the Warrior baseball program."

Schlotterbach taught at Cedar Rapids Jefferson while he was coaching the Washington baseball team, and Henry taught at Linn-Mar while he coached the Warriors. Lombardi is a physical education instructor at Washington and has run a successful football program at Wash, making the playoffs five times in six years.

"I think I know a little baseball, but I'm not coming in here as a baseball expert," he said. "I'm coming in here as a really committed member of this community.

"I know what boys are coming up and I know what boys are here, and I know that the environment can be more conducive to having a positive baseball atmosphere here at Wash. And I think I can impact it."

Lombardi has two sons, Rocky, a seventh grader, and Beau, a fifth grader, and he's helped coach their youth baseball teams. Both of his sons are talented players. He and his wife, Kari, also have three daughters. Both Lombardis teach and coach at Washington.

Lombardi will be the only coach in the Mississippi Valley Conference who will serve as the head coach in football and baseball during the 2011-12 school year.

"It's going to be a challenge," he said. "But if we can get kids and get them excited about playing baseball and get them to realize we can be successful here, I think we can be."

Lombardi said there were only 39 players in the Washington baseball program this past year in ninth through 12th grades. He said more than 50 guys attended Tuesday's meeting.

"That's a good sign," he said. "We need to get this program healthy. We need to make it fun.

"I know we have good kids in the building who are not playing baseball. So my goal would be to get those kids back involved."