GOLF : Pressure Is Off When Coaches Hit the Greens

For three months, Dave Brown, Fountain Valley’s highly successful basketball coach, spends an average of two hours a day conducting practices inside the Barons’ gymnasium.

Once the season starts, Brown’s teams traditionally compete in a tight race for the Sunset League title. Big crowds fill the gym for key games. The intensity level is high, and the pressure to win is evident.

Now, picture Brown at Seacliff Country Club coaching the Barons’ golf team. The scene is quiet and serene as three foursomes play a league match. Life as a golf coach is low-keyed and easy.

“It’s quite a change of pace from basketball,” Brown said. “You’re out there in the wide-open spaces of a golf course. It’s refreshing after spending the winter in the gym.”

Brown is one of several prominent coaches who double as a golf coach. In most cases, the term “coach” is a little misleading.

“I was more of a moderator than a coach,” said Tim Devaney, Sunny Hills High football coach, who served as the school’s golf coach last season. “The kids had skills beyond what I could teach them. My main job was to keep them in competition.”

Brown has been Fountain Valley’s golf coach the past eight seasons. He said his attraction to the sport was the absence of outside pressure to win.

“It’s not so much ‘us versus them’ but more ‘you versus the course,’ ” he said. “The kids on the golf team aren’t as intense as my basketball players. It’s the nature of the game.”

The nature of the game has kept Bob Minier coaching Mission Viejo’s golf team for 20 years. Minier, who played on the golf teams at three different colleges, also serves as the school’s basketball coach.

Mission Viejo won the CIF Southern Section golf title in 1974. The Diablos once won 43 consecutive matches and have produced five college players and one touring pro (Mark O’Meara). Minier, a 7-handicap, said coaching golf has adversely affected his game.

“I’m too concerned about the kids or lining up courses,” he said. “We’ve been restricted to playing only twice a week, so I don’t get to do much coaching.

“Most of our kids have learned the game on their own through their country club. If they have a problem, they go to their teaching pro. That’s the biggest difference between coaching golf and coaching basketball.”

Minier said that golfers are generally different from other athletes at his school.

“Golfers are a weird breed,” he said. “I find it very hard to sell the team concept, which I think is so important in basketball. As a coach, I sometimes don’t know what’s happening because I’m playing in a different foursome.”

Minier thinks that the season in which the the sport is played leads to a different personality among golfers.

“You’ll find the closer it gets to the end of the school year, the tougher it is to keep all the players attentive,” he said. “Some just can’t wait to get out of school and lose their concentration.”

Devaney enjoyed his tenure as Sunny Hills golf coach and said that playing every day at Los Coyotes Country Club became “addicting.”

“It was fun, but there were times I wished I was with the football players,” he said. “I was dealing with kids who have a different personality than, say, a football or basketball player.

“They’re high strung. Here I was, shooting in the 80s, and I was coaching players who got upset if they didn’t break par.”