Desmond Named Baseball Coach at Chaminade

It would be a tremendous turnaround if newly hired Chaminade High baseball Coach Dave Desmond can actually pull it off.

A 180-degree reversal of fortune, to be specific. “The only reason we hired him,” Chaminade Principal Tom Moran quipped, “is that he promised us a 21-game winning streak next season.”

Chaminade, which competes in the Southern Section 5-A Division, was 4-22 last spring and endured a 21-game losing streak.

Desmond emerged from more than a dozen candidates for the position, made available when former Coach George Vranau’s contract was not renewed.

Desmond, 28, served last season as an assistant at Chaminade and coached for the five previous seasons at Highland Hall in Northridge, a member of the Small Schools Division. Highland Hall was 91-28-1 in Desmond’s tenure and won 38 Westside League games in a row, a state record for consecutive league victories.

“It’s going to be an awful lot of work,” Desmond said. “It’s a challenge to get something out of (players) that they don’t know they have right now.”

Desmond was founder of the now-defunct Valley Dodgers, a semi-professional team that participated in the National Baseball Congress World Series in 1986-88.