O’Brien Follows Detours to Estancia : Division III boys: After various jobs in Arizona and Southern California, coach now trying to win Eagles’ first state title.

It was a little past midnight Friday morning, and Tim O’Brien, Estancia High School’s nail-biting boys’ basketball coach, couldn’t sleep.

O’Brien had watched his team defeat Servite, 56-47, Thursday night in the semifinals of the Southern California Division III regionals at Cypress College. Now, he was restless; a ticket to Oakland for the state championship was only a game away.

Arsenio had bid farewell to his guests by the time O’Brien began preparing a game plan for today’s regional title game against Pomona. First up, he reviewed the film from last Saturday’s Division III-AA Southern Section championship game between Estancia and Pomona, otherwise known as “Nightmare on Martin Luther King Boulevard.” Estancia missed its first 15 shots and ultimately lost, 48-45. It wasn’t pretty.

“I came to a boil about 1:30 that morning,” O’Brien said. “I felt like going outside and playing. Finally, I wrote about a million notes for Friday’s practice. If nothing else, we’ll be well-organized the second time around.”

Preparation has been the key to O’Brien’s coaching success through stops at Scottsdale (Ariz.) Sawuro, Santiago, Tustin and finally Estancia, four years ago.

O’Brien, 36, grew up in Cincinnati and never played high school basketball. He was a sophomore walk-on at West Chester College, a school outside Philadelphia that then played Division I in the same conference with Temple, La Salle and St. Joseph. But throughout his playing days, O’Brien knew his future calling was coaching.

“I liked the idea of coaching because you never had to wear a tie,” he said. “Ironically, I now wear a tie for every game.”

He wrote letters to every successful Division I program during his senior year at West Chester and was hired as a graduate assistant at Arizona State in 1978 when he was 21. He packed his belongings into a 1972 Chevy Nova and headed west.

Suddenly, O’Brien was in the big time, helping to coach future NBA players Fat Lever, Byron Scott and Kurt Nimphius and California high school legend Greg Goorjian.

“I loaned my car to Fat, and he totaled it,” O’Brien said. “It was one of my first lessons as a coach.”

O’Brien moved to Mesa (Ariz.) Community College, where he was an assistant for three years under Coach Tom Bennett. Mesa was 79-15 in three seasons, and O’Brien says he learned everything about coaching from Bennett.

Well, almost everything. He got a quick lesson in job security on the high school level two years later when he was laid off at Sawuro High in 1984 after leading the basketball team to a 48-7 record and two appearances in the state championship game.

“I got laid off the first year but was named vice principal in charge of truancy for my second year,” O’Brien said. “That didn’t sit too well with some of the other teachers, so I got laid off again.”

So O’Brien tried the job market in Southern California. He had tried several times before, at University, Estancia and Capistrano Valley, and was unsuccessful.

This time, he was hired at Santiago, which was his stepping stone. O’Brien had six players and led the team to a 12-10 record, its last winning season. He moved on to Tustin after one season and laid the groundwork for the 1987-88 team that advanced to the Southern Section 3-A Division championship game after he left.

“There were those who told me I wouldn’t get along with Marijon Ancich (the football coach) and that Tustin was a football school,” O’Brien said. “But most of my players didn’t play football, and I got along with Marijon fine.”

Still, when Joe Reid resigned at Estancia four years ago, O’Brien jumped at the opportunity to coach at a perennial basketball power with top facilities.

“I talked to a lot of people before I left Tustin,” he said. “When some people at Tustin told me to go, I knew it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I had applied at Estancia in 1984 when Larry Sunderman resigned.

“I heard there was a real good job opening and drove out here from Arizona, walked right into the administration office and told them I wanted to apply. I did the same thing at Tustin. If you want a job bad enough, you have to go after it.”

But O’Brien admits he was unhappy in his first season at Estancia. He thought he had let down Tustin seniors Leo Parker and Brad Cantrell and said he still felt loyalty to the school’s program when it advanced to the 3-A division final.

“On a personal note, I was miserable all season,” O’Brien said. “It took some time adjusting to Estancia. It was difficult.”

There was one more career move left in the life of Tim O’Brien, or at least so he thought. For three years, he made his presence felt at Christ College Irvine. He bought a season pass for two seasons and estimated he attended more home games than some of the school’s administrators.

When Dave Wild, former Christ College coach, hinted that the 1989-90 season would be his last, five representatives from the school attended Estancia’s playoff game against Trabuco Hills in 1989 to get a firsthand look at O’Brien.

He attended Lutheran classes at St. John’s Lutheran for five months “so I could better understand their ways.” He showed an interest in the job for three years, went through a 60-day interview process and even ran a practice with the team.

“I used to walk around the school on the weekends and go into the weight room or the locker room and plan color codings,” he said.

But last May, O’Brien said he was shocked to learn that Westmont College assistant Greg Marshall had been hired to replace Wild. Today, he can only conclude, “I guess I wasn’t what they were looking for” and adds, “I had a nice Plan B.”

Estancia had seven of its top eight players returning from a team that won the Southern Section 3-A division title and opened the 1990-91 season as the county’s top-ranked team.

“Knowing that I had this team to come back to made it (rejection) easy,” O’Brien said. “But I often wonder what more I could have done.”

For encores, O’Brien is working on the school’s first state championship. Estancia breezed through the Pacific Coast League and entered the sectional playoffs as the top-seeded team in Division III-AA.

There were more one-sided victories in the playoffs until Estancia met Pomona in the Sports Arena, a graveyard for perimeter shooters. Pomona earned an upset, but Estancia got a second chance with an at-large entry into the regionals.

Two victories later, and Estancia returns to the Sports Arena for a rematch. The winner advances to Oakland the following Saturday for the state championship.

O’Brien best summed up his team’s return to the arena when he stood in front of reporters after a victory over Servite in the semifinals and said, “The good news is we’re going back to the Sports Arena. And the bad news is we’re going back to the Sports Arena.”