The Man Who Built the ‘Aztec Empire’ : La Quinta Coach Who Made Team His Family for 15 Years Thinks It May Be Time for a Change

For 15 years at La Quinta High School in Westminster--since he became the school’s head baseball coach at the tender age of 22--Dave Demarest has fashioned the program he calls the “Aztec Empire” into one of the most successful in the Southern Section.

Demarest, who grew up in Palos Verdes Estates, has achieved success at a high price: His personal life has taken a back seat. He is caught in the coaching whirlwind, a dedicated individual who has spent most of his life either playing or working in athletics. He has become a “lifer,” the kind of guy you expect will always be around ballparks.

A lifer’s social life always takes a back seat. He admits baseball is his immediate family.

“Settle down? Naw. Not for me,” he said at lunch the other day. “I like to travel and meet people.”

He once told fellow teachers that he’d like to have children. But, as yet, there is no romance in the works.

Demarest has a coaching record of 274-107. Only once in this decade has he not won at least 18 games. Later this month La Quinta, ranked third in Orange County and atop the Garden Grove League at 13-0, will enter postseason play an 11th consecutive time. The team has won 19 straight games.

For the first time this year, Demarest talked about leaving his post.

“La Quinta is ready for a change and so am I,” he said. Trouble is, he isn’t sure exactly what he would do and won’t leave the Aztec Empire to just anyone. He wants to make sure the winning tradition continues.

Demarest would like to start a baseball program at a new high school or be a college assistant or pro scout. He needs a change of pace, he said, because he is growing tired.

“Sometimes,” he said with a sigh while discussing his schedule, “I think that if I could just find someone with a condo on Maui who wanted to trade houses for the summer I’d do it.”

Those who have witnessed his ambition say that if he leaves La Quinta the move will probably be no better for his personal life. For some time he has found it difficult to separate his personal and professional lives. The only time he took a break from his year-round schedule was in 1975 when he spent a summer in Tahiti.

Demarest was a two-sport star at Palos Verdes High and the school’s athlete of the year in 1968. He was courted by several major universities to play baseball but settled on Cal State Long Beach because only the 49ers allowed him to play basketball as well.

When Demarest arrived in Long Beach in 1968, he quickly realized that his basketball career was over. Jerry Tarkanian had recently been named coach and Demarest found after the first week that he did not fit into Tark’s system.

But on the baseball field he fit in nicely. In his four-year career as a center fielder he did not make an error (that remains a 49er record). He was a captain and most valuable player and was chosen an Academic All-American Athlete of the Year.

When his career was over, he worked in a summer recreation camp. Teaching was not a profession he had given much thought to, but his work in the camp made him realize he enjoyed helping kids. Friends encouraged him to enter the profession. An acquaintance set up a job interview at La Quinta as a mathematics instructor. At the time he was unaware the school’s baseball job had become available.

“It was the right place at the right time,” he said. Soon after he was hired, despite reservations about his age, La Quinta appointed him baseball coach.

It could just as easily have been basketball, which he terms “my first love,” or boxing that would have eventually hooked him. As a freshman basketball coach at La Quinta, his record was 176-24 in 10 years.

“As a lower-level coach,” said Palos Verdes basketball Coach John Mihaljevich, “he had outstanding teams.”

Twice he was offered the head basketball job at La Quinta. He turned it down because he did not feel he could do justice to the players as the coach of two major sports with overlapping seasons.

Athletics have dictated his life since he was a 6-year-old in Rocky Point. “There are days I wish there was something else I could do,” he said with lament. “Athletics have been my whole life.”

Demarest eats, drinks and sleeps baseball. At La Quinta, he is known as the king of one-liners, a free spirit who can turn a practical joke with the best, a grinning redhead who blushes beet red when the joke is on him.

“Dave had an easygoing way about him,” said Palos Verdes’ Mihaljevich, who was Demarest’s basketball coach in high school.

Demarest claims he is a bit misunderstood by some co-workers. “Some people ask me what it would be like to lose. I say, well, the best way to find out what it’s like is not to lose.”

Demarest’s “family” consists of many former players and their families. Last summer, for example, he opened his Huntington Beach home to a former player’s two sisters and their children when they had nowhere else to go. Watching the children play, he said with a grin, was one of his most memorable experiences.

Demarest is well known and liked in Southern California’s baseball community. When a college head coaching job becomes available, as it has at Cal State Long Beach, he is invariably rumored as a leading candidate.

Not so, says Demarest. “I have never applied for any of those jobs.”

Those who know his program say one of his best attributes is building rapport with athletes.

“He’s good with kids,” USC Coach Mike Gillespie explained. “He is a strong teacher, a fundamentalist who doesn’t lose touch with the kids.”

Demarest says he believes in being open with his players.

“The key,” Demarest said, “is not so much making the players happy. The important thing is to be honest with them and that they know and accept their role on the team.”

He is also considered one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the game.

“The guy is always out and around,” said Gillespie, who coached against teams Demarest played for when Gillespie was at Rolling Hills High. “He goes to clinics to learn from other guys. He runs in a certain crowd, a crowd of coaches who are knowledgeable about the game.”

Demarest admits he buries himself in his work. In a typical summer he runs La Quinta’s off-season team in a Santa Ana league, is an assistant coach of a Connie Mack League team in Long Beach and usually assists two or three all-star teams composed of California high school players. He has also coached in Sweden and visited Europe, Hawaii and Australia with touring high school baseball teams.

“I have been able to use my position as a baseball coach to travel,” he said. “I have been places I probably wouldn’t have gone had I been settled down.”

Conflicts still arise. A classic tale about Demarest and the sport he dearly loves goes like this: Last summer he was involved in several baseball leagues. Each began playoffs at Blair Field in Long Beach the same week in August. In one seven-day span he coached in eight games.

A young woman he had met through a friend flew into Los Angeles unexpectedly from Arizona with the understanding she would have a couple of dates with Demarest. They never met. After corresponding by phone for several days and getting nowhere with him, the woman became frustrated. She told Demarest: “You told me you coached baseball, but this is ridiculous.”

“I warned her I did a little baseball coaching during the summer,” he said. “She said that would be fine. When she got here, I don’t think she knew what I was talking about.”

Another case of a blown opportunity at settling down?

Naw.