Estancia’s Carpenter to retire
When Newport Harbor High water polo coaching legend Bill Barnett retired last year, Estancia High’s John Carpenter became the longest tenured head coach at one school in the Newport-Mesa area.
Now Carpenter is also walking off the pool deck.
Carpenter, who is in his 37th year coaching boys’ water polo and swimming at Estancia, said Wednesday that he will be retiring following this current swim season.
He is also retiring as a teacher at Estancia, where he teaches biology.
“I think after 38 years, it was just time,” said Carpenter, who coached at Saddleback for one year in 1983 before coming to Estancia. “Thirty-eight years, plus a year of student teaching and a year of substituting, so I’ve been in education for 40 years. I still enjoy teaching and I still enjoy swimming and polo. It was hard to actually say the words, ‘I’m retiring,’ because it’s all I’ve known for 40 years. But now that I have, it’s kind of growing on me every day that it’s time. I got remarried five years ago, and just want to spend more time with the wife and my daughters and my parents.”
The Estancia boys’ water polo finished third in the Orange Coast League this year, returning to the CIF Southern Section Division 3 playoffs after a four-year postseason drought. The boys’ swimming team is 4-3, 1-1 in league following Wednesday’s 98-72 loss to rival Costa Mesa in the Battle for the Bell swim meet.
Carpenter, 62, said he is unsure of his overall record at the school but he has plenty of memories from his nearly four decades in aquatics there.
“I’m really proud of what I’ve done over the years at Estancia,” he said. “We’ve taken kids to new levels, and that’s just a really rewarding thing. There haven’t been a whole lot of titles. I mean, we don’t have our hat to hang on that, but there’s been a lot of individual games and exciting times that have gone on. I hope I’ve imparted on them over the years that it’s always best to do the right thing. I’ve always tried to teach them over the years to be good citizens, good students, be ethical in everything they do.”
Just this year, Carpenter said he had a highlight when his Eagles rallied from a four-goal deficit to stun Godinez, 9-8, and clinch the CIF berth. His 2010 team, which featured players like Charlie Umansky and Preston Schow, is considered one of the best in school history. So is the 1979 team, which advanced to the CIF quarterfinals in Carpenter’s first year at the helm before losing to Barnett’s Sailors.
Carpenter said he will continue being a junior lifeguards instructor for the city of Newport Beach, calling that a life passion. He’s been doing it for close to 50 years.
As for the future of the Estancia program, a new aquatics center is in the works. The project is expected to cost $7 million and will provide Estancia with a 50-meter Olympic size pool. The Eagles are the only one of the four Newport-Mesa public high schools which doesn’t have one.
“It would have been nice to have the 50-meter pool a few years ago,” Carpenter said. “But that being said, I’m really glad that it’s going in. It’s really going to benefit the program when that does happen.”
