Demarest Would Love to Crate Up a Title : Division III baseball: La Quinta coach, in his 20th year, runs a program with equipment that includes milk containers and shopping carts.

Dave Demarest leaned back on his milk carton crate--like the throne it is--and surveyed the scene.

His La Quinta baseball team was taking infield practice in front of him, but no one was hitting them baseballs. Instead, players were moving to their left or right, pretending to field grounders. They then pulled baseballs from their gloves and threw to first. The balls were then dropped into another milk crate.

It was madness, sheer madness. Pantomime baseball.

Ah, but the method made sense. Demarest leaned forward on his plastic crate and made it all clear.

“You tell a kid to work on going to his left, then you hit a baseball right at him?” he said. “That doesn’t make sense. This way, they can work on going to one side or the other and come up throwing. It’s how we do things.”

For 20 seasons, in fact.

They’ve done things a little differently at La Quinta over the years. Forget sophisticated facilities and state-of-the-art equipment that deep-pocket programs thrive on. Those schools that have depth charts instead of shopping carts--the ones that La Quinta’s equipment is pushed around in.

Give Demarest a crate to sit on and few dedicated players and he can do wonders. And has.

The winningest Orange County baseball team during the ‘80s? Esperanza? El Dorado? Mater Dei? Nope, La Quinta with 215 victories.

In 20 years, Demarest has a record of 353-136. His teams have won eight league titles and qualified for the playoffs 17 times. The Aztecs made 14 consecutive playoff appearances from 1978-91.

Yet, the one thing that has eluded Demarest is a Southern Section championship. That could be achieved today, if the Aztecs beat Tustin in the Division III championship game at Anaheim Stadium.

“In 20 years, I have never won the last game of the season,” Demarest said. “We’ve always turned in our equipment on a loss. It would be nice to end a year with a win for a change.”

Change was a key word for Demarest this year. He almost missed out on this run to championship game.

Demarest, 42, has been the Aztecs’ coach since leaving Cal State Long Beach. He was hired as a math teacher at La Quinta in 1973 and was given the baseball job.

The program has thrived, yet Demarest almost walked away from it last October. He accepted the baseball job at Trabuco Hills, then turned it down the next day.

“A lot of people don’t understand and I’ve got to stop trying to explain,” Demarest said. “I felt a couple of years ago that I needed a change and maybe La Quinta needed a change. Trabuco Hills was a great opportunity, but I felt uncomfortable. No matter what people say, when you make a decision like this, you have to think of the kids.”

Demarest began thinking.

Here he was, two months into the school year, walking away from kids he had worked with during the summer. Added to that was the fact that Trabuco Hills’ assistant Randy Brower was the No. 2 candidate for the Mustang job.

“Randy had been with those kids all summer and here I was leaving kids I had been with,” Demarest said. “I was better off staying here.”

As were his players.

“That was a really scary time,” Aztec catcher Kenny Granger said. “I couldn’t imagine a La Quinta baseball season without Coach Demarest. It would have been bizarre.”

Players not only depend on Demarest as a coach, they rely on him as an anchor. More than one has been kept in school by his sage advice.

“He’s one of the few guys I know who really cares about the kids,” said Randy Vanderhook, a La Quinta assistant coach the last eight years. “He’s constantly on them about going to class and doing their homework. He teaches them responsibility and the kids respond.”

Said La Quinta pitcher Jim Livernois: “There are some kids who wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Coach Demarest. On the field he’s your coach. Off the field, he’s your friend.”

Maybe it was because he was so young when he became the Aztecs’ coach, but Demarest has always operated that way. He is closer to his players than some of them are to their relatives.

It’s not unusual to see former players return to watch La Quinta games, a tribute to their coach.

“Everything I am right now is because of Coach Demarest,” said Walter Dawkins, who plays at USC. “There’s no way I can repay him for the amount of work he’s put into my career.”

Demarest has built and maintained a program at a school where enrollment has dropped sharply. Every January, he holds baseball tryouts and rarely do they draw more than 20 kids.

Still, he has won.

“He gets the absolute most out of every kid that plays for him,” La Quinta Athletic Director Jim Perry said. “He gets kids to accept and understand their roles. I’ve never seen anyone like him at any level.”

Demarest learned the game as a player. He was a four-year starter and an academic All-American at Cal State Long Beach.

Then he relearned the game as a coach.

Few have studied the game as closely as Demarest. He attends clinics and seeks input from college and professional coaches.

Even fewer have dedicated so much time to coaching. Besides the Aztecs, Demarest has coached Connie Mack teams for more than a decade. He has coached at the Olympic Festival, taken teams to Europe and Australia. Last summer, he was an assistant for the Junior National team.

Demarest is also sought out for advice by other high school coaches.

“He pays so much attention to detail,” Vanderhook said. “In practice, he’s constantly drilling kids on ground balls and fundamentals.”

The lessons sink in.

La Quinta has one of the premier programs in the county, rivaling schools with twice the enrollment. The Aztecs are never the most intimidating team. They often resemble a youth team more than a high school team.

“He takes teams that look like they’ve just come off the sandlot field and does something with them,” former La Quinta Principal Andrew McTaggart said.

Only four of Demarest’s players have been drafted out of high school into the majors in 20 years.

“I don’t know if Mike Curran (Esperanza) or Bob Ickes (Mater Dei) could coach here,” Demarest said. “Of course, I don’t know if I could coach at a larger school. I see all those players that Mike and Bobby have and I wonder how they keep everyone happy.

“We have 15-20 kids and they all play different positions. It’s fun.”

Fun is big around La Quinta’s baseball field.

The first milk crate showed up seven years ago. It began when Demarest injured his back and couldn’t stand for any length of time. He would coach while sitting on a crate.

Soon more began popping up.

“The cafeteria people get really mad,” Granger said. “But they never get their crates back.”

During games, Demarest and Vanderhook sit on the crates and coach. They will again today at Anaheim Stadium.

The crates also are used to cart around baseballs and the medical kit and are used during infield practice. The shopping carts, another Demarest idea, carry bats, the pitching machine and anything else the Aztecs need.

“I hate things that are messy,” Demarest said. “We put everything in the shopping cart. That way, it looks neat. The cart may look messy, but the dugout looks neat.”

It may not look “professional,” but the crates and cart have become a symbol of La Quinta baseball. Other teams in the Garden Grove League have started using crates.

“They’re going to catch up with Dave one of these days,” McTaggart said. “I think even Knudson is conducting an investigation.”

Said Demarest: “Great, 20 years and all I’m going to be remembered for is milk carton crates.”

Demarest will leave a little more of a legacy, although it might be a while before he actually leaves La Quinta.

A victory today would cap his coaching career, but he’s far from retiring. In the past, Demarest’s name has surfaced when college and junior college jobs have opened. But he has no plans to move on.

La Quinta, he said, is where he belongs.

“I was evaluated this year by a new administrator,” Demarest said. “He asked me, ‘This is your 20th year here and how many of them have you been coaching baseball?’ I said, ‘Twenty.’ He said, ‘Twenty years as the varsity coach.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He shook his head, but that’s me. You always know where to find me. Same time, same place, same station.”

Or, as Vanderhook put it: “When Dave dies, they’ll carry him off the field with that milk crate.”