During a period when Arizona State’s Jim Brock was considered one of the top two or three college baseball coaches in America, he offered Sahuaro High coach Hal Eustice a job as a Sun Devil assistant.
Not once, not twice, but three times.
And each time Eustice chose to stay at Sahuaro, where he taught chemistry, baseball and life.
Eustice became Sahuaro’s first-ever baseball coach in 1969. The Cougars went 2-18. But the former Amphitheater High pitcher, the son of a blacksmith, toughed it out and by the time he died in 1991, the Cougars had won state championships in 1973, 1974 and 1982, and reached the 1984 and 1986 state title games.
If you count Eustice’s years at San Manuel High — where he led the team to a state championship in 1963 — he won a total of 436 games.
Was he the best high school baseball coach in Tucson history? It’s surely debatable. Tucson High’s Hank Slagle and Andy Tolson combined to win 17 state championships, but Eustice did so with fewer resources.
Not to diminish the remarkable accomplishments of Slagle and Tolson, but there were 5,600 students at THS when Slagle retired after winning title No. 10 in 1954. Sahuaro, a start-up school in 1968-69, had no such advantage.
When Eustice died of a heart attack in 1991 (he was only 56), Brock told the Star that Eustice “was probably the best teacher of fundamentals in the state. You wouldn’t get a lot of arguments about that. He was a great innovator and he loved the game more than anyone.”
The run of Eustice’s all-state players at Sahuaro is almost unmatched in Tucson history: Jim Olander, Bruce Ferguson, Tom Wiedenbauer, Gib Siebert, Kevin Dukes, Wes Kent, Sammy Khalifa, Steve Martin, Joe Estes, Wade Leitch, John Butcher and on and on.
Brock recruited many of Eustice’s top players and signed them to be Sun Devils, including Dukes, Khalifa, Seibert and Martin.
Our top-heavy Top 10 list starts with Eustice and doesn’t lose much spice as it gets to No. 10. The one common thread: high school baseball coaches used to serve longer terms in the mid to late 1990s.
