Baseball Legend : Harbor Coach Jim O’Brien Has Made Winning a Habit

Jim O’Brien paced anxiously on the grass as he watched his young Harbor College baseball team whip Compton College in a conference game. He yelled at his center fielder, who was standing near the wall, until veins popped out of his neck. Then he clenched both fists after sophomore right-hander Chris Garrett threw a fastball down the middle of the plate for a strike.

“Hey, that’s too much! Bring it in a little! What are you doing back there? Bring it up! Bring it up!”

A few minutes later, when one of his players was tagged out trying to steal second, he waved his blue cap angrily in the air while stomping on the reddish dirt behind the dugout.

The huff somehow vanished when the Seahawks scored in the next inning. O’Brien greeted the player who sprinted to the plate for Harbor’s first run with a high five. Then he shouted at the next batter with both hands in the back pockets of his blue and gold uniform.

Such are the antics of Jim O’Brien, the vehement and demanding baseball coach who is in his 13th season at Harbor.

“This is a tough sport,” O’Brien said, “and you have to play it hard. I’m a very intense coach. We play very aggressively, which sometimes gets mixed up with dirty, but we’ve never played dirty. Just aggressive. Very aggressive.”

The 51-year old South Bay baseball legend, who is also Harbor’s athletic director, has led the Seahawks to nine conference championships and two state titles in 1978 and 1984. Ninety percent of his players have gone on to play at Division I colleges.

Among the recent ones are third baseman Eric Albright (Texas A & M), pitcher Eddie Lopez (Cal State Long Beach), second baseman Kevin Higgins (Arizona State) and outfielder Jack Hollis (Stanford).

Harbor’s best representative in major league baseball is pitcher Eric Bullock, perhaps the finest player in the school’s history. After bouncing around in the minor leagues for several years, he is in contention for a spot on the Philadelphia Phillies’ roster.

“He makes you believe that you can play anywhere in the country,” said Harbor Assistant Coach Tony Bloomfield, who was a an all-state shortstop for the Seahawks in 1983 and later played at the University of Nevada-Reno. “You’re going to have off days, and he prepares you for them. He really knows how to motivate players.

“He’s a disciplinarian who tries to get the most out of his players, and he’s very demanding when you’re on the field. It was very exciting to play for him.”

O’Brien came to Harbor as a baseball coach and physical education teacher in 1976, when baseball at the school was just an ordinary program. He almost took a coaching job at a junior college in his native San Diego but decided to stay at Harbor, where he earned the reputation of a sharp and knowledgeable master of the game.

“A lot of good high school kids followed me here,” O’Brien said. “When I took this job, it was between Southwestern College and Harbor. I came here because I knew more people in the South Bay and I had a better chance to be more successful in a hurry.”

And he was. In his first year O’Brien led the Seahawks to the conference title and, for the first time in the school’s history, the state tournament. Harbor finished second in California that year after losing to Long Beach in the final of the state tournament.

“Before Jim,” said athletic equipment manager Earl Webb, who has been at Harbor since 1957, “baseball at Harbor had some good moments, but nothing like it is now. It’s like night and day. He’s just a person that you want to play baseball for.

“It’s like the young kid who says, ‘Boy, I’d like to play for the Dodgers,’ or ‘Boy, I’d like to play for the Yankees. Boy, I’d like to play for Coach O’Brien.’ He’s just so damned successful.”

Former Harbor Athletic Director Scrappy Rhea, who hired O’Brien, admits that he never thought the Seahawks could make it to the state playoffs. Before O’Brien, that its.

“He’s a very dedicated and hard-working coach,” said Rhea, who also coached baseball and football at Harbor, “but the main thing about him is that he’s very persuasive and convincing with his players. He molds them with one objective, and that’s to win games for Harbor College.

“It takes a rare individual, you know, that can do that year after year after year.”

Twelve years of doing it at Harbor is just half of the O’Brien success story. He got in the business of designing winning baseball programs at North Torrance High when he was 22.

O’Brien was fresh out of Brigham Young University, where he was an outfielder for four years. He was looking for work as a physical education teacher, and the school had an opening. After teaching at North Torrance for a year, he was asked to take over the varsity baseball team. He was also the head varsity football coach for two years.

Jerry McIlvaine, a former rival and a friend of O’Brien’s, says his success is owed in great part to the way he handles players. McIlvaine was the baseball coach at league rival South Torrance for 20 years, and he’s seen vintage O’Brien.

“He played power baseball, down and dirty,” McIlvaine said. “It was a win-at-all-costs type of thing. He believed in that, and he got his kids to believe in him. They loved him.

“If I wanted an instant winner at any level, I’d hire Jim O’Brien in a second. He could turn any program around immediately.”

O’Brien led the Saxons to eight Bay League titles and two CIF 4-A crowns (1971 and 1974) in 12 years. In 1972 North Torrance lost in the CIF championship game.

O’Brien was a rigid coach, according to Jim Zambarelli, who played baseball and football for him at North Torrance in the 1970s. The two-time all-league and all-CIF second baseman says O’Brien had great strategy and worked extremely hard on the fundamentals of the game.

“He put a little bit of fear in you,” said Zambarelli, who is the vice president of Ball Industries in El Segundo. “He was pretty tough and he worked you real hard. I think it helped because when it came down to the end, we won. That’s even helped me in life. He taught me to be very competitive, and in the business world you really need that.”

O’Brien says, however, that heading a winning program isn’t always fun, which is part of the reason he left North Torrance. “I came to the conclusion at North, as I have at Harbor, that pretty soon I would be expected to win all the time, “ he said. “That puts tremendous pressure on my players.”

Harbor third baseman Steve Kristy agrees with O’Brien. The sophomore, who was an all-city and all-league player at Westchester High, says Harbor is always expected to do well.

“Every mistake we make is closely analyzed,” Kristy said. “We’re not allowed to make mistakes. We’re not supposed to. We’re just supposed to win.”

That hasn’t been enough, though, to make O’Brien leave Harbor, which is 4-1-1 in the South Coast Conference. He’s made only two attempts to move on. He applied for the head coaching position at Loyola Marymount four years ago and at Cal State Dominguez Hills five years ago.

Dominguez Hills hired a former O’Brien player and assistant, Andy Lopez, and Loyola hired Dave Snow. Lopez is in his first year as the head baseball coach at Pepperdine University and Snow is in his first season at Cal State Long Beach.

“It’s a good situation for me here,” O’Brien said. “There’s good job security for me here, and I don’t have to travel too far from home. Sure, there were other jobs in other parts of the country, but I didn’t want to move away from here. My family didn’t want to go.

“Now it’s gotten to the point where I want to spend more time with my family, and taking another job (at a bigger school) wouldn’t allow that. Besides, I promised my daughter I’d be a good grandfather.”

O’Brien and his wife, Anna, have five children. Last year his youngest kids, 19-year-old twins Sean and Casey, played baseball for him. O’Brien says it was not easy coaching his sons.

“Last year,” O’Brien said, “was the toughest year I’ve ever had in coaching. For their sake, I’d never do it again. They couldn’t miss. They were always expected to play perfect because they were Jim O’Brien’s kids, and that wasn’t fair.”

It may seem ironic that O’Brien doesn’t want that kind of stress for his sons, since he has put tremendous pressure on himself throughout the years. Being No. 1 is the only thing good enough for him.

“For Jim O’Brien,” McIlvaine said, “coming in second is bad. He just doesn’t like that. He needs to be the best.”

That even applies to the family enterprise. O’Brien started a Christmas tree business 24 years ago, and now it’s one of the largest and most successful in the South Bay.

Once he gives up coaching, the kids, the grandchildren and the trees should keep him busy, although he’ll miss the role of baseball mentor.

“At the end of almost every season,” O’Brien said, “there’s rumors that it’s Jim O’Brien’s last. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much longer I’m going do it. Right now I’m on a year-to-year basis.

“At the beginning of the season I told a couple close friends this might be my last year, but a player came up to me and looked me in the eye and asked, ‘Coach, will you be here next year?’ What could I say? It’s a very emotional subject for me.”

O’Brien wiped the one tear that escaped his watery eyes and confirmed that he will be back next season.

“I’ll be here. I told him I would, and I will.”