Long Beach State University Athletics
Demarest Not Done Teaching Baseball
7/16/2007 12:00:00 AM | General
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Demarest Not Done Teaching Baseball More than 34 years ago, while working in a 49er camp on the Long Beach State campus, a 22-year-old LBSU grad and former baseball player for the school was approached about a possible teaching opportunity in Orange County. A few weeks ago, Dave Demarest decided to retire after spending 34 years as a math teacher and baseball coach at La Quinta High in Westminster. Hey, does time fly or what when you're having a grand time doing what you love to do? "I guess it's time to find something else to do now," Demarest said Sunday night, chuckling because he already has a pretty good idea of what he is going to be doing once baseball season rolls around. After coaching La Quinta baseball teams that won 753 of 968 games in 34 seasons, including CIF Southern Section championship contests, Demarest may be done with teaching algebra, geometry and trigonometry classes. But he's not about to give up teaching eager youngsters the correct way to bunt, hit a cutoff man or pivot at second base while turning a double play. "I'll be holding a clipboard somewhere in the spring, helping someone coach his team," the mentor who produced approximately 30 players who eventually played professional baseball, including another former 49er, Oakland A's shortstop Bobby Crosby, said. "I've seen a lot of teachers in their mid-50s (he's 57) get burned out". He didn't use that clich to explain his decision to retire four years before he could have stepped down and continued to collect his full salary. But it wasn't difficult to read between the lines. "I'm doing OK (financially)," he added. "And 34 years at any one place, doing one thing, is a long time in this world." Demarest, who isn't married, plans to do a lot of traveling before deciding upon his next stop as a baseball coach. And most of it will involve hooking up with guys he coached at La Quinta who are now playing professionally or are coaches themselves. That figures, since he learned long ago from the guys who coached him at Long Beach State (the head coach Bob Wuesthoff recruited him out of Palos Verdes High, he played on the freshman team for Rick Hayes, and was a starter during John Gonsalves' first three seasons as the 49ers' head coach) what "coaching" was all about. "Sometimes you get into coaching because you want to win a lot of games and have good teams," the guy who did plenty of both said. "But those guys taught me that coaching is about teaching kids how to play the game the right way and to be good people." And, by every account, Demarest did a lot of that as well. |
