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.