Northwestern baseball coach Paul Stevens knew exactly how to describe his relationship with assistant coach Joe Keenan.

“He’s like how behind every successful man there’s a good woman,” Stevens said.

No, Keenan is not a woman. But he is the only member of NU’s coaching staff to have been with Stevens since the head coach took over the team in 1988.

And Keenan has established himself as one of the most important parts of the Wildcats’ squad.

“He takes care of catchers, and catchers are the backbone of the team,” Stevens said. “He is taking guys that haven’t been catchers and molding them into tremendous catchers.”

This season Keenan is seeing his hard work pay off.

When catcher Ken Padgett left after the 2003 season, Keenan was asked to turn senior Dan Pohlman into a starter behind the plate. The former outfielder had never caught before.

“Everything that I’ve ever really known about catching, Joe has taught me,” Pohlman said. “I can’t really explain all of the things he has done, but at the same time, he’s always giving me something new. He’s always teaching me.”

With Keenan’s help, Pohlman has found his way onto scouts’ radar screens at a position he hadn’t played before this season. In June, Pohlman likely will become the sixth catcher in the Keenan era to be drafted by a major league club.

Although Keenan is an integral part of the Cats’ success, his position doesn’t earn him any money. The volunteer coach hasn’t been on NU’s payroll since the early ’90s.

“I just like being around the kids,” Keenan said. “I like being in a situation where there’s a winner and loser every day. Either you feel really bad when you lose or you feel really good when you win. But you feel like you’re alive.”

Keenan is an attorney, a job he says is “kind of like a priest. Once you’re an attorney, you’re always an attorney.”

He travels about 85 miles to baseball practices every other day from his job in Belvidere, Ill.

“He’s just a tremendous asset as far as that voice of reason that’s always there, someplace around me, to sit there and give me some other insight,” Stevens said. “If anybody thinks they know everything about everything and they can see everything, they’re sorely mistaken. You’re only as good as the people around you.”

And Keenan, too, is only as good as the people around him. The coach is motivated by his family in most of what he does.

Keenan wears a baseball uniform because his wife, Sally, likes to see him in it.

He became a volunteer coach instead of getting paid so he could spend more time with his two children. But he continued coaching because “the kids were at the age where they thought hanging around with the baseball players was the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

Coaching catchers is a way for Keenan to contribute to another family.

“When I teach Danny (Pohlman) and my catchers or the kids I’m around, I’m looking at it from the standpoint of teaching them how to live life,” Keenan said. “There are a lot of failures, and the real lesson in life is to treat failures as a stepping stone to success.”