Hansen's Hundred, No. 27: 'Old baseball catcher' Rich Alday became one of Tucson's top coaches

A crowd of 18,000 people piled into Arizona Stadium on a chilly December night, 1965, eager to see if undefeated Tucson High could win its first state football championship in 13 years.

If you followed prep football in Tucson in the '60s, there was no local sports brand or legacy greater than the Badger football program. From 1937 to 1952, THS won seven state titles. Four of those champions were undefeated. During one stretch, the Badgers won a state-record 32 consecutive games, 15 by shutout.

“It gave us superiority over Phoenix, bragging rights,” Tucson quarterback Rich Alday told me. “Growing up a baseball fan like I did, we were like the Yankees of high school football in Arizona. There was a lot to live up to.”

Alday felt the pressure; the Badgers had not won a state championship since 1952.

Tucson routed Yuma High School 26-7 that night, keyed by Alday’s 36-yard touchdown pass in the first quarter, which prompted another run of football greatness. The Badgers won four state titles over six seasons.

Alday’s sports career followed a similar arc; for a half-century, he became one of the most successful sports figures in Tucson history. The irony is that he is remembered as a baseball man, not an undefeated state championship quarterback.

From 1974 to 2019, Alday — ranked No. 27 on our list of Tucson’s Top 100 Sports Figures of the last 100 years — coached Pima College and the New Mexico Lobos to a combined 1,031 baseball victories. Not only that, after leaving the UNM baseball program in 2007, he returned to Tucson and coached Ironwood Ridge’s girls softball team to state championships in 2014 and 2016, a period in which the Nighthawks went 107-34.

Alday considered himself “an old baseball catcher” as much as a coach. He was the Badgers’ starting catcher in the mid-1960s, earning a spot on the Arizona roster as a freshman, although he later transferred to Arizona Western College and Emporia State, an NAIA powerhouse in Kansas.

He spent a year playing minor-league baseball for the Washington Senators and then transitioned to coaching, spending three years on the Emporia State staff.

But he did not lose touch with his hometown. When Pima College announced it would start a baseball program in 1974, Alday phoned PCC athletic director Larry Toledo. You might imagine the conversation.

“We don’t have a baseball facility,” Toledo said. “And we don’t have any scholarships. We can’t pay for assistant coaches.”

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Alday took the job anyway. His first three PCC teams played home games all over Tucson, mostly at Mission Manor Park and at the well-worn Santa Rita Park facility on 22nd Street.

“What Rich built, from scratch, was way beyond my expectations,” Toledo told me. “Pima became the top baseball program in the ACCAC in the '80s, and one of the top three or four in the nation.”

Pima reached the NJCAA World Series in 1981, 1983 and 1985, finishing fifth, third and second. The Aztecs won five ACCAC championships. Alday’s '80s teams went 355-146, and he did so almost exclusively with Southern Arizona players, including future big-leaguers Jack Howell and Gil Heredia. His two key assistant coaches, Jim Fleming and Scott Stanley, have gone on to work in big-league scouting and administrative roles for more than 25 years.

Alday attracted so much attention that Stanford’s Mark Marquess, who coached the Cardinal to 1987 and 1988 NCAA championships, asked Alday to be part of the Team USA organization for the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

That Olympic connection came into play in the spring of 1989, when the New Mexico Lobos were looking to re-invent their baseball program, which they had stopped funding in 1987. UNM committed to hiring a coach to help them be competitive in the Western Athletic Conference. Alday applied, but Lobo athletic director Gary Ness said he was looking for a coach with NCAA experience.

That’s when Marquess phoned the Lobos’ AD.

“I just can’t say enough good things about Rich,” Marquess told the Albuquerque Journal. “He’s a first-class person. A lot of guys know X’s and O’s, but not that many know how to relate to young people the way Rich does.”

The Lobos hired Alday. He won 514 games through 2007, at which time he moved back to Tucson, umpiring virtually every level of softball and baseball, and helping the baseball program at St. Augustine High School get started.

Finally, in 2018, Alday returned to Pima College, coaching the team he founded 44 years earlier. He improved his PCC career win total from 496 to 517 before retiring a year later.

“I’m glad I got to come back home,” he said. “It’s like a huge family here.”

Sadly, Alday died in January of complications following cancer surgery. He was 71.