(Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comments from Greg Coombs.)
Greg Coombs has resigned as the Godinez boys basketball coach, where he had spent the past 10 years of his 39-year career, all of it coaching teams in Santa Ana.
Coombs, 63, retired as a Santa Ana Unified School District teacher two years ago. He was a walk-on coach the past two seasons at Godinez.
Coombs will be replaced at Godinez by Rob Morgan, who was the girls basketball coach at Godinez from 2008-12.
Coombs has also coached at Century and Santa Ana high schools. He started his coaching career at Santa Ana in the 1980s and became the first basketball coach at Century when the school opened in 1989. He spent 21 seasons at Century.
Coombs likes to travel, something that he had limited time to do as a basketball coach, but he said he is not closing the door on coaching.
“I’ve seen enough coaches say ‘no more coaching’ and then at some point in time they go back to coaching,” he said.
He will remain involved with the Southern California Interscholastic Basketball Coaches Association of which he has been president and with the CIF Southern Section’s management of basketball. Godinez in recent years has been one of the sites for CIF-SS championship basketball games, and Coombs has helped run that event.
He said he would return to coaching in some capacity for the right situation, perhaps at a smaller school close to his Lake Forest home.
“But I have no plans right now,” Coombs said.
Asked for his all-time starting five players he coached, Coombs declined to create that list.
“There have been so many good ones,” he said, “I don’t know if I could limit it to five.”
Among those he coached at Godinez was Brandon Smith, who went on to play at UC Irvine. Perhaps his top player at Santa Ana was Bobby Joyce, who also played at UNLV. His Century players included Mike Zepeda who played at UC Riverside.
