He had already won 117 games as the Carlmont football coach and was coaching baseball when the administration at the Belmont school asked Jim Liggett to take over the Scots softball program for just one year until they could find a coach.
After 41 years he stopped coaching softball and retired at the end of the 2016 season as arguably the greatest softball coach in California history.
Mr. Liggett, who ended his career with a state-record 1,009 coaching victories and eight CIF Central Coast Section championships, died last Sunday night at 76 from complications due to ALS.
“I was the athletic director and I was coaching other sports at Carlmont, and the softball coach didn’t want to come back,” Liggett told Prep2Prep the day he recorded win No. 1,000 last year. “It was similar to baseball, they only had around eight games on the schedule, and it was a great group of girls, so I took it figuring it would only be for one year. I figured I can’t go wrong for a year but that first year’s team got me to come back. Now to get 1,000 wins is really something, but it’s always been about the girls.”
Despite his deteriorating condition Mr. Liggett attended every Carlmont home game this past season.
“He was a really great mentor to me and until the day he died he was mentoring me. There will never be anyone like him,” said current Carlmont Coach Marco Giuliacci, an assistant to Mr. Liggett for three years who met him when his oldest daughter Danielle made the Carlmont varsity in 2011 as a freshman.
Among the steady stream of well-wishers that came by to say hello before and during the 1,000th victory game was one of those girls, Lori (Grech) Martinelli, a shortstop and leadoff hitter on Liggett’s very first team in 1976, and one of the first inductees into the Carlmont softball Hall of Fame.
“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” said Martinelli, who after embracing Liggett before the game and posing for pictures with her old coach sat in the stands with several of his early “girls” who are now women in their mid-50’s.
Another former player that was not going to miss the festivities of the 1,000th win was 2007 graduate Ashley Chinn. She was one of Liggett’s best pitchers and hitters ever, and was in the circle for wins No. 700 and 800 before going on to pitch four years for Stanford.
“The reason Liggett had had so much success is because he has a way of bringing out the best in his players, and then attributing that success to them,” said Chinn at the game. “He's challenging, a jokester, and he can be intimidating, but at the end of the day, he's our No. 1 fan.”
Over the years, Mr. Liggett, a former Triple A player in the Baltimore Orioles organization and the 1999 Cal-Hi Sports State Coach of the Year when his Scots went 35-4 and defeated Archbishop Mitty-San Jose for the CIFCCS Division II championship, was the milestone leader.
Mr. Liggett was the first softball coach to reach 500 wins in state history, the first to reach 600, the first to reach 700, and the only coach to ever get past the 800-win mark in the Golden State. In fact, he is so far ahead of No. 2 that according to the Cal-Hi Sports list of records the coach closest to him is Margaret Neill. She finished the season at Paraclete-Lancaster with 746 career wins. That means Neill is 263 wins behind Mr. Liggett and that number of wins alone would be a career milestone for most coaches.
“Based on his longevity and what he did over a long period of time Liggett has to be considered one of the greatest softball coaches ever, and particularly in Northern California,” Cal-Hi Sports Editor Mark Tennis said.
“Very, very few coaches in any sport had the kind of success he had, or had their name synonymous with their sport like him,” continued Tennis. “San Mateo County softball has always been very competitive and he’s had a lot of players that have made some big marks.”
Besides Chinn a player that played for Mr. Liggett that Tennis knows well is Tori Nyberg, the current softball Coach at Dominican University in San Rafael. She was the pitcher on the 1999 team and won a record 35 games, and is second all-time with 113 career victories.
“I saw him a couple of weeks ago and he told me he wasn’t doing well. He told me to just keep winning and keep the program strong,” Giluliacci said. “There’s nothing he wanted more than to see the program flourish. The program was his baby.”
“When I first met him I was intimidated,” continued Giuliacci. “This big guy that had won all these games and championships, but the more I got to know him he wasn’t intimidating at all. He was actually a soft-spoken man unless you did something wrong on the field and then he’d definitely let you know about it. He loved making the girls laugh and they loved his sarcasm. He would do anything for them. He just loved his girls.”
According to Giuliacci services for Mr. Liggett are pending.
