Dream Job

Fred Hill Jr. is at the Final Four again this year, rubbing shoulders with colleagues and counterparts from around the country. The 47-year-old Hill just joined the fraternity on Monday. When the Verona, N.J., native arrived in Indianapolis on Tuesday, he was a first-time head coach whose new job at Rutgers satisfied a career goal. An added bonus is that Hill's father, Fred Hill Sr., is in his 23d season as the Scarlet Knights' baseball coach. "Growing up in New Jersey, Rutgers was the state university, and I always thought it could be a good job," said Hill, who attended Verona High and Montclair State.

Adapted from an online discussion. Question: I love my job. It's the closest thing I can imagine to a dream job, in a highly selective industry where positions exist in only a few cities in the country. My husband does not particularly love his job, although, as he'll fully allow, it pays well, has a great mission, and involves nice coworkers. He just feels he has outgrown it. I support this in theory, but whenever he forwards me listings for new positions, they almost always involve huge pay cuts and locations where I have no hope of finding work in my field.

He speaks in rapid, breathless bursts that are exhausting to listen to, if not to deliver. But talking, and specifically talking about sports, is what Michael Quigley does for recreation, and, if all goes according to plan, soon will do for his vocation. ESPN is the latest player to enter the oversaturated reality TV genre, and Quigley, a 40-year-old self-employed auto supplies salesman from Lansdowne, Delaware County, is one of 12 finalists in the network's Dream Job show. Starting tomorrow, Quigley and his fellow SportsCenter anchor wannabes will compete in a weekly series in which they perform typical on-air television tasks, such as sideline reporting, anchoring, reading scripts and interviewing athletes.

At first, Jon Nese only wanted to know if rain would cancel a baseball game. All the rest - the fascination with hurricanes, cyclones and tornadoes, the Ph.D. in meteorology, the career in teaching and on television - all that would grow from that pivotal time when rain might stop the 7-year-old from keeping score during the high school baseball games his father coached. Sure as the seasons change, the rain question led to the snow question, and there was Nese's mother shaking her head in disbelief and shouting for him to be careful as he trudged out to Route 22 with a yardstick to measure the depth of snow near his home in Steubenville, Pa. Now 36, Nese (pronounced Niece)

Had a nightmare the other night. It didn't start out like one, but by the end, it was as bad as the doozy that haunted me during the Cold War '50s. In that one, the Red Chinese popped out of manholes and shot at me as I walked to Noble Road Elementary School. When this one began, I was in a room with important people. I think Mayor Rendell was there, a state senator or two, and some corporate types. They were way at the other end of a huge, mahogany table, but they were smiling and telling me what a good job I'd done in Maryland and Kentucky and how much they wanted me to bring my magic to Philadelphia.

When the head basketball coaching position opened at Immaculata College in June, everybody called Patty Canterino. Players, friends, nuns, family - everybody, it seemed, urged her to apply. Actually, to reapply. A year ago, Canterino was turned down for the chance to coach her alma mater, where she was one of the school's last scholarship basketball players in 1992, before it switched from Division II to III. Now that Immaculata was hiring again, Canterino questioned whether she should again risk rejection.

From up-close contact with hardened criminals to jarring pagers that interrupt his sleep to inheriting the unsolved suburban bomber case, it may be hard to understand why Joseph W. Carroll wanted to be district attorney. But Chester County's new head prosecutor says he has fulfilled a longtime goal. "I always wanted the job," he said emphatically. "I knew what I was in for, and I'm very happy to be here. " Not surprisingly, Carroll, 52, of West Chester, would have preferred that the unidentified pipe bomber had been apprehended before he took over, but he is committed to solving the crime.

Tim Welsh stumbled into coaching swimming, then worked for nearly a decade in summer youth leagues. Now, he has his dream job - as the head coach at the University of Notre Dame. "I always wanted to be here, even though I didn't go to school here," said Welsh, a native of Lansdowne who has been the men's and women's swimming coach at Notre Dame since 1985. "This was my dream job. After I had been at Johns Hopkins for a few years, and I knew I would be staying in coaching, I said, if the Notre Dame job ever opened, I wanted to apply.

Her path began in a dirty, mean orphanage in Romania where few people, if any, held the babies who cried out from their cribs. Or maybe it began even earlier, when her hands trembled the first time she held a sickly, premature baby in North Carolina. For Jill Kail, the adoptions of her two physically and developmentally disabled sons were the first steps along a difficult road to overcoming their handicaps - as well as her own - and finally led to her "dream job. " Kail, a Cherry Hill resident, has finished her second week as the township's new ombudsman for the disabled.

Age: 26. Neighborhood: Center City. Job: Producer, "The Preston and Steve Show" on WMMR (93.3-FM). If her life were a reality TV show, it would be called: "It's Always Happy Hour in Philadelphia. " Nominated by: "Don't know, but I love them!" (Actually, it was Mark Maggi of McFadden's and Daily News columnist Dan Gross.) Kids: "Nope. " Giving back: "My radio show hosts a five-day on-air food drive around the holidays, and a blood drive in the spring. I also help out where I can at various charity events around the city.