Catching up with: Tom Baldwin

Barry Faulkner

Teaching history is how it all started for Tom Baldwin. After

coaching football in parts of six decades, however, including 12 stops

spanning the high school, college and professional ranks, the spirited

sideline sage has chiseled his own special niche in the history of Orange

County football.

And, though he will turn 70 in January, the always upbeat Baldwin is

taking steps to ensure he will add several more chapters to his

noteworthy career.

“I know giving up coaching is going to happen eventually, but I’m not

in a hurry,” said Baldwin, who was head coach at Costa Mesa, Santa Ana

and Santa Ana Valley high schools and is currently the defensive

coordinator at Santa Ana Valley. “I think I could go 10 more years. As

long as I feel good and it’s fun, I’m going to be out there.”

Baldwin, whose former players frequently comment on how little he has

aged over the years, said he recently dropped six inches from his waste

line (now size 34) in order to decrease potential obstacles to his

remaining on the field.

“I just threw a bunch of clothes out, because I needed new ones,”

Baldwin said. “And I’m no longer taking blood pressure medication. I

found a diet that works for me and I’m feeling super. I just realized I

wanted to keep coaching and so I had to take care of anything that might

keep me from doing it.”

Baldwin has done plenty since beginning his career as an assistant at

Long Beach State, where he played after competing for Santa Ana College.

He began coaching at Santa Ana High as an assistant in 1958.

As a head coach at Santa Ana in the late 1960s, his teams were among

the finest in what many believe is the golden age of prep football in

Orange County.

“I remember going home to change the afternoon of a game and seeing

people lined up at the Santa Ana Bowl to get into the game that night,”

he said.

Baldwin coached the Costa Mesa varsity for eight seasons (1984-91) and

has since worked as a coordinator at Corona del Mar (offense) and Costa

Mesa (defense).

In addition to his prep coaching experience, he spent two seasons at

Chaffey Community College. He was the secondary coach for the Southern

California Sun of the now-defunct World Football League. He was also

director of personnel and vice president in charge of football operations

for the Anaheim-based Sun.

Baldwin said loyalty to a star-studded junior class at Santa Ana,

including standout future NFL receiver Isaac Curtis, was the reason he

turned down an offer to join then-coach John McKay’s staff at USC in

1968. He believed he owed it to his juniors to coach them as seniors the

following fall.

After the World Football League folded, he said he spurned

opportunities to work in the NFL, instead accepting a more lucrative job

selling insurance, in order to offset the debt he incurred when the

financially strapped Sun did not pay him his final six months with the

team.

It wasn’t long, however, before he was spending afternoons watching

practice at Santa Ana High. Saints Coach Tom Meiss asked him to join the

staff as an assistant and, after some soul searching, Baldwin soon seized

the head-coaching opportunity at Costa Mesa.

“I had a doctor who gave me a neat analogy about my selling

insurance,” Baldwin said. “He told me when I played football, I was

probably the kind of guy who would just tape up a sprained ankle and play

hurt. I said, yeah, that was right. He said my selling insurance instead

of coaching was like playing hurt. I thought about it and decided I had

to get out of that darn job.”

Baldwin said his first game back as a coach vindicated those

instincts.

“I still remember it like it was yesterday,” he said. “(Santa Ana) was

playing Fountain Valley at Orange Coast College and I walked out of the

locker room down the ramp toward the field and the adrenaline was just

pumping so hard. They tried to tell me that making a big big sale was

better than winning a football game, but, for me, it wasn’t even as good

as taking the field for practice.”

Baldwin considers his first Mesa team, which finished 0-9-1 in 1984,

among his favorites.

“We had kids who had never played in a winning football game,” he

recalled. “Those guys worked so hard and we had a lot of fun. It was one

of the most rewarding seasons I’ve had as a coach. I remember the last

day of practice that season. A lot of kids were crying, because they

didn’t want their season to end.”

His involvement with the game and with kids won’t end any time soon

for Baldwin, who still teaches economics at Mesa and enjoys time with his

family, including his wife of 47 years, Carol. He also has two grown

children and six grandchildren.