David Perno eyed Georgia’s early 2008 baseball schedule and never flinched.

Sure there were three-game sets with Arizona and Oregon State, and traditional Atlantic Coast power Florida State was also in the mix. But despite fielding a team that was just 23-33 a year earlier, the Bulldog boss knew he was guiding the fortunes of a special group.

“This team has been around and been through it all,” Perno said. “Sometimes you can play a tough schedule early and get beat up and lose confidence, but that was never the case with this team. You’ve got to have all the pieces to get to where we’re at and this year we had all the pieces.”

Georgia started the year 2-4, with an exhibition loss to the Atlanta Braves also in the books. But today the Bulldogs are 41-23-1 and bound for Omaha, making their second trip to the College World Series in the last three years.

“We have 19 of our 25 guys in the dugout who were part of last year’s 23-33 team,” Perno said. “To see where we’ve gotten, to be SEC champions and a national seed, just shows what great kids we have.”

One of those “great kids” is junior shortstop Gordon Beckham, who was selected 8th overall in the recent MLB Amateur Draft. He heads to Omaha to face No. 1 Miami (52-9) with 51 career homers, and is the SEC Player of the Year and a finalist for the 2008 USA Baseball Golden Spikes Award.

In defeating North Carolina State in the Super Regional in Athens Beckham was practically unstoppable, rapping two round-trippers in his final two at bats in Sunday’s decisive game and keeping his batting average hovering at .400. It gave the program a perfect 16-0 mark in elimination games played at Foley Field.

Like his coach, Beckham is glad his team was thrown into the fire early in the season.

“You play that tough schedule for a reason, and that’s to be ready for the postseason,” he said. “It helped us build character and we learned from it. The key is getting good guys in here and we’re as close in that dugout as any team in the nation.

“Some of it is luck and some of it’s hard work, and this year there was a lot of hard work.”

The Diamond Dogs won with solid pitching and timely hitting in 2008. The team batting average is .309, and aside from Beckham’s team-leading 26 home runs for the year Georgia has gone yard 92 times in all.

The pitching staff boats a 4.82 earned run average, with five pitchers boasting ERAs at 4.00 or lower.

Beyond the numbers, however, was the commitment to win.

“When last season ended we buried it,” Perno said. “We said things were going to be different this year, and even with a really tough schedule in the early going we were confident that was going to be the case.”

Beckham agrees.

“All year long we won games when we had to,” he said. “We did it in the Regional and the Super Regional, and now we go to Omaha and try to do it there. As I said we’ve built character as the season has gone along. We’re excited about the opportunity to keep playing.”

The Bulldogs’ matchup with the Hurricanes is set for 7 p.m. Saturday in Rosenblatt Stadium. The game will be televised by ESPN.