PHOTOS: Four baseball coaches from OC receive most prestigious national honors

Among those inducted were top row George Horton (second from left) and John Altobelli, represented by his daughter Alexis; and bottom row, Dave Demarest, second from left and Don Sneddon, third from left. (Photos courtesy American Baseball Coaches Association).

Dave Demarest, George Horton, John Altobelli and Don Sneddon honored.

The American Baseball Coaches Association inducted 11 coaches, including former Orange County coaches Dave Demarest, George Horton, John Altobelli and Don Sneddon, to its Hall of Fame on Friday, Jan. 6 in Nashville, Tenn.

Honorees included the six-member ABCA Hall of Fame Class of 2023 along with three members of the Hall of Fame Class of 2021: Hal Baird (Auburn), George Horton (Cal State Fullerton/Oregon) and Don Sneddon (Santa Ana College) along with two members of the Class of 2022: the late John Altobelli from Orange Coast College and and Gary Gilmore (Coastal Carolina), officials said in a release.

To see the slide show, click on the first photo:

The inductions from 2021 and 2022 were delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I couldn’t ask for a better exclamation on a 50-year career,” Demarest said this week.

The 2023 honorees were:

Jerry Dawson, Chaparral High School (Ariz.)

Dave Demarest, La Quinta High School

Eric Kibler, Horizon High School (Ariz.)

John Lowery, Jefferson High School (W.Va.)

Jeff Messer, Slippery Rock University (Pa.)

Tim Saunders, Dublin Coffman High School (Ohio)

Demarest is the winningest high school baseball coach in Orange County. Demarest, who had a 753-213 record at La Quinta, was one of six high school coaches inducted and the only one from Southern California inducted.

“Demarest also became a 35-year Lifetime ABCA Member (awarded after 35 years of continuous membership with the ABCA) this year and was honored on-stage that Friday morning,” said Matt West, assistant executive director of the organization. “He is one of just 490 ABCA members (we have over 13,000 members annually) who have reached lifetime status.”

“I’m kind of a perfectionist and I only reached my goal three times ….. I did it three out of 34 times, you always got to look at the big picture,” Demarest said in an interview with OC Sports Zone in July 2022.

Sneddon, Horton and Altobelli’s inductions were delayed due to the pandemic.

Horton, who led national power Cal State Fullerton to the 2004 National Championship, has joined the Orange County Riptide as a special assistant, officials announced.

Sneddon led Santa Ana College to three community college titles and 16 conference championships and was the winningest community college coach at the time of his retirement. He had a career record of 1,072-383-3 over 32 seasons.

Altobelli was head baseball coach at Orange Coast College from 1993 to 2019 and was the winningest coach in the program’s history. He is the fifth California community college coach to win four state titles.

Altobelli led OCC to seven conference titles and eight appearances in the final four. Altobelli died in a helicopter crash with eight others on Jan. 26, 2020.

The induction ceremony was held during the 79th annual ABCA Convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville.

Induction to the ABCA Hall of Fame is the highest honor bestowed by the organization, officials said. The ABCA was founded in 1945 and the Hall of Fame began in 1966, they added.

(Tim Burt of OC Sports Zone contributed to this story; source: ABCA).