Q&A; WITH TIM MANG:

Corona del Mar High boys’ tennis coach Tim Mang, who announced his retirement from coaching last week, has coached at CdM since 1993. In that time, the Sea Kings won three CIF Southern Section division titles, and were also three-time winners of the National High School All-American tournament that Mang created.

The Daily Pilot asked Mang about some of his favorite memories.

Question: What are some of the biggest changes that have happened in high school tennis since you’ve been coaching?

Answer: Two changes, the ones that I’m still against. One is the scoring system. I think doubles should get more points than singles. We had that for awhile, then the CIF voted it down. That was really great, as far as your strategy goes. We had a point and a half for doubles, and a point for singles.

You had to do some coaching. A lot of these guys, they don’t coach, they just put their singles players out there. Their singles players are so good, they’ve got their pros, and you don’t have to spend that much time. But if you work with your doubles, you can say, “Hey, if we sweep doubles we’re going to win this thing.” The top high schools really liked that, because those guys are pretty good coaches.

The other change, when I was on the [CIF Southern Section] advisory committee, I was the head of the Division I team championships. What we would do, there were Division I, II, III, IV and V, and they would all play [the championship match] in different areas on a neutral site. It would be after school, like a regular match, so all the kids and the parents could go watch these matches ...They had all kinds of student body and kids rooting them on, but now it’s all at one spot [the Claremont Club]. I think it’s a shame, because a lot of people can’t watch the finals. It’s at Claremont, it’s during the day, and the kids are in school.

Q: I guess, technologically, the racquets are a lot more advanced, and things like that. Some people would say that’s made the level of the game higher.

A: I disagree with that. I think more along the lines of [John] McEnroe or [Jimmy] Connors. There are less shots made now with the power racquets. You stand on the baseline and bash now. Connors wanted to start a thing where everyone had to play with a wood racquet, and I think that’s a great idea. It’s a different game. Guys like [Ilie] Nastase, and those guys, had beautiful finesse shots.

Well, I guess they have changed it, because it used to be big serves but they cut that down. They made the grass longer at Wimbledon, they made the courts slower at the U.S. Open and the Australian Open and that made the points longer. That’s probably a positive, but that’s nothing to do with my high school coaching career. What I do is I come up with these freaking negatives and try to figure out how to change them.

The other thing is that we have all these foreigners who are playing in college tennis, so a lot of the high school players can’t play at top Division I schools. That really bothers me, so that’s one other reason why I started this [National High School All-American] tournament.

Q: And the racquets used to be wooden, right?

A: I used a wood racquet in college. I still have my Jack Kramer autograph, and that was the greatest tennis racquet in the United States.

When I was a ball-boy at the Balboa Bay Club, and I was captain of my high school team at Newport Harbor, Dorothy Yardley was social director of the Balboa Bay Club. She got the tennis pros together, we had Pancho Gonzales, Lou Hoad, Pancho Segura, Jack Kramer all these guys had a tour. She got me and six other kids from Newport Harbor, we got to be the ball-boys for Pancho Gonzales and Lou Hoad and these guys. It was unbelievable. We got to have lunch with them, and then she got the Davis Cup team, we’d also ball-boy for the Davis Cup players. Then we got a free tennis racquet, any kind we wanted, we’d drive into LA to pick it up. I picked up my Jack Kramer autographed tennis racquet from Wilson. Things like that, you don’t forget.

Another thing I’ve really liked is going to Ojai every year since 1959. One thing they don’t do is give you the fresh cups of orange juice at Libbey Park anymore. They used to give you the cups and you could drink them all day.

Q: Who would you say is the best player you’ve ever coached?

A: Taylor [Dent]. My top players have been Taylor Dent, Parker Collins, Jed Weinstein, Cameron Ball, Carsten Ball, Brian Morton, Wesley Miller and Garrett Snyder. What’s incredible about that is I think I had four of those kids on one team in one year. An incredible team.

Q: Do you have a favorite team win over the years, where you look at that win and say it’s a pretty special win?

A: I’d say when we won the national championship at the Palisades Tennis Club [in 2002]. Unbelievable win, I think we were down 2-1 in the doubles, and we had to win four of the five singles. It was against Menlo, which had just beat a really strong University team in the semifinals. I went to the Menlo coach and I said, “Make sure I get your name spelled right on the trophy.”

...It came down to Cameron Ball playing on center court at Palisades, everybody in the clubhouse watching this match. He was playing James Pade, the top-ranked high school player in the nation. He was going to Stanford on a full-ride. This kid was nails.

It was all tied, and it came down to Cameron’s match against James Pade. [Ball] was ahead 6-3, I think, then [Pade] tied it up. They went to a tiebreaker, and Pade won the first point of the tiebreaker, and I was like “That’s probably it.” But Cameron went nuts.

He was hitting aces, returning serves for winners. He won the next seven points to win the national championship. That was probably the most incredible match. People were screaming and yelling at the Palisades clubhouse, of course they’d had a few beers I’m sure. They were hanging over the balconies, and the team just sprinted over to Cameron on center court. It was just unbelievable. That was one of my very highs.

Q: What has been the most rewarding part about coaching?

A: The team part. Watching a team together, rooting on their teammates. It’s changed a little bit nowadays, I think, but just the excitement of the whole team. When I coached the girls, it was the same thing, they’d get so excited because we’d come down to a very big match and everyone was screaming and yelling. That’s really neat.

Also rewarding for me has been being involved with quality kids and parents. I get to follow them after high school, see how they did in college or even in the pros. I’ve just been very fortunate to have some of these kids, they’re so outstanding. Very few coaches can experience that.

...We’ve been talking about these great players, and most of them have had great partners on their team. Corona del Mar has always had at least two very good singles players, sometimes three. They have a backup, but in the last two years, [UC Irvine-bound senior] Fabian [Matthews] hasn’t had a backup. He’s all alone out there playing unbelievable players. The last match he played [against Thousand Oaks], the guy was just totally worn out. He’s playing two of the top players in the nation, and they’re sitting around waiting for him. It’s incredible what he’s done the last two years in the singles.

Q: Anything else?

A: There’s the one trivia thing I really like. There’s only three guys who have ever won CIF as freshmen in the history of the state, and I was there for all three.

I was court director when Pete Sampras [then of Palos Verdes High] won it [in 1987] . I gave him his trophy. And Jonathan Leach of Laguna Beach High won it at Fountain Valley Racquet Club [in 1988], which is a little club that they tore down.

Then [in 1996], the year that I stopped being tournament director of the CIF for individual playoffs, Taylor [Dent] won it. He was the third guy. The guy that took for me as director, was Jason Newman of Beverly Hills. He didn’t seed Taylor, because Taylor lost three matches during the year and he was still growing.

I said, “Jason, you didn’t seed Taylor and he won CIF?” And he goes, “How do you think I feel? My guy had to play Taylor in the first round, and I had to drive him all the way back home after losing to Taylor.”

MATT SZABO may be reached at (714) 966-4614 or by e-mail at matthew.szabo@latimes.com.