Carlson: Tweit ponders future at NHHS
Time is everyone’s enemy and sooner or later, the time comes when something every person with a long-time career faces, and that’s where Eric Tweit, a standard bearer at Newport Harbor High for some 35 years, enters the picture.
He has been around the Newport Harbor High campus so long one might wonder if he had a home. He does, for the last 20 years residing in Costa Mesa.
But it began 15 years earlier.
A chance acquaintance with Newport Harbor’s Jim Newkirk when he was coaching track and field at St. Paul High in Santa Fe Springs provided the match prior to the late Bob Hailey’s retirement from his storied coaching career at Harbor and the fire was lit as he walked on to became the Sailors’ head boys’ track and field coach Feb. 1, 1980.
Looking back at those moments, he says, “I knew then I was at the right place, I had walked into ‘unbelievable.’”
Now, in his 45th year of coaching he admits, there is a time for everything, and the upcoming girls’ cross country season will be his last … yet in the same breath, recalls conversations with retired coaches who when asked if they hung up their clipboards too soon or too late, the answer always seemed to be, “too soon.”
Harbor’s athletic director for 20 years (1989-2009), he watched the Sailors post 38 CIF team championships and so many individuals in that span, including of course, the never-to-be-forgotten 1994 CIF championship football campaign that produced a 14-0 record with spine-tingling victories, again and again. He relishes the memory, but quickly interjects with how much he enjoyed the emergence of girls’ water polo on the Sailors’ campus.
As for the athletes … Misty May, April Ross and Aaron Peirsol were at the top of his list, but No. 4 was pretty much a blur considering the blue-chip depth of the Long Gray Line.
Four times his girls’ cross country teams captured CIF championships, as well as four state crowns. This fall is his 26th year with girls’ cross country.
Tweit, 67, is a lifetime bachelor and it is perhaps the key to the scenario as he is seen everywhere there is a Tar.
Whether in the classroom, coaching, walking the sidelines or in the stands supporting the Sailors the usual obligations were not a factor in his quest for all things Newport.
He was a nominee for the CIF Sports Hall of Fame last year, but the decision has been put on a hold by CIF because he is still active as the girls’ cross country coach. It makes sense … Hall of Fames are places where the retired languish.
“I’m not concerned about that at all,” said Tweit. “It doesn’t really matter if I am chosen, the fact that some people believe I should means as much as if it actually happens.”
His final season is not far away, but as he says, “I want to make this last year my very best year of coaching. It’s kind of driving me,” and he relates the situation into what sometimes is a hang-up for coaches.
“A coach may have done a lot of things over and over during a long career with athletes and repetition can dull you, but for the athlete it’s his or her first experience. The trick is to put that first coaching effort into it every year.”
Whether a teacher, coach or athletic director, the principal is always a factor depending on the support he lends, and for Tweit, sometimes in stormy waters over the years, the saving grace came with the appearance of Dennis Evans, when the remarkable “Principal Switch” occurred between Newport Harbor and Corona del Mar high schools in 1988.
“He was,” said Tweit, “the premier principal.”
Among Tweit’s favorite memories as an athletic director was his coaching coup when he hired basketball coach Larry Hirst. The most influential is football coach Jeff Brinkley, who Tweit lured to the campus when he knew Coach Bill Pizzica was retiring, leading to his hire by Pizzica and Principal Tom Jacobson, the same men who hired Tweit.
A basic math teacher, it all started adding up from the time he was a dedicated so-so athlete at Excelsior High in Norwalk, on to Whittier College and walking on at St. Paul, eventually as the head track and field coach for three years, before he ran into Newkirk, and chose to take that fork in the road toward 16th and Irvine.
One would think he hasn’t a lot to be concerned about with longtime flame Alexis in the wings … but he’s aware of the obvious, the vacuum, as he points out: “It’s the relationships that all of a sudden are gone.”
ROGER CARLSON is a former longtime sports editor of The Daily Pilot.