Disparate paths led five coaches to state titles
Five Tucson teams won state championships in spring sports, which isn’t unusual. The appeal is how vastly different the coaches of those five state champions are.
Get this:
- Cienega’s softball team, 26-8, is coached by 45-year-old Eric Tatham, an old second baseman who played for the 1987 Tucson High state championship baseball team. Tatham then went to Yavapai College to play baseball, and switched career fields, working 10 years as a manager at Wal-Mart. He ultimately graduated from Heritage College near Yakima, Washington.
Tatham returned to Tucson, became an English teacher at then-new Cienega High School, and worked as a PA announcer at the school’s softball games. To get his daughter, Stephanie, into softball, Tatham kick-started his own summer travel league club, Team Velocity, 13 years ago. By 2008, he was Cienega’s head coach; they won the 2010 state championship and Stephanie got a scholarship to Denver’s Division II Colorado Christian College, where she hit .331 this season.
- CDO’s baseball team (32-2) is coached by 65-year-old Keith Francis, who graduated from Missouri and became a policeman in Kansas City, Missouri, for 27 years.
He moved to Tucson in 1998, established a real estate business with his wife, and became an assistant coach on CDO’s 2000 state championship team. By 2002, he was CDO’s head coach, winning another state title. He then served as an assistant at Pima College and at Arizona, and this year returned to CDO for another state title.
- Catalina Foothills’ boys tennis team, which won the state title, is coached by 74-year-old Bill Wright, who graduated from University of Denver’s Law School in 1963, became a district attorney in Anaheim, California, and 10 years later became the head tennis coach at Cal. He was the 1978 NCAA Coach of the Year.
Arizona hired Wright in 1987, and he was the Wildcats’ head coach for 19 years, leaving in 2005. He operates a thriving summer tennis camp in Vail, Colorado. Wright became Foothills’ boys head coach this year.
- Empire softball coach Shannon Woolridge, 44, who coached the Ravens to a 30-5 state-title season, played for Rincon in the 1987 state championship baseball game (it lost to Gilbert 6-5) and then completed his education at Arizona.
He has been assistant principal of Desert Sky Middle School and 13 years ago became the first JV softball coach at Cienega. He went from there into administration, and joined Cienega’s Tatham as a Team Velocity coach, later moving to the powerful Desert Thunder summer travel program under Lance and Kelly Fowler. He became head softball coach (and athletic director) at Empire and is 89-16 in three years. His daughter, Brittany, was 21-1 as a pitcher this season and has accepted a scholarship to Texas A&M-Commerce.
- Desert Christian baseball coach Grant Hopkins coached the Eagles to a 31-1 season, his third state championship in succession. He was a pitcher on the first-ever Desert Christian baseball team in 1989, but was injured in an automobile accident, ending his playing career.
After graduating from NAU, Hopkins returned to Tucson and works as a stockbroker. Somehow, he has found time to coach the Eagles to a cumulative 86-7 record the last three seasons.
Five coaches. Five state champs. Five different career paths: a stockbroker, an English teacher, a retired attorney, a former assistant principal, a retired cop.
That’s what makes high school sports so fascinating. They are rarely predictable and open to all walks of life.
