Dunn: A coach for all seasons, Evan Chalmers served as a coach for more than three decades

The 2023-24 school year is winding down and Evan Chalmers, a coach for all seasons, no longer needs to replenish a roster, fill non-league game dates for an upcoming schedule or provide sometimes difficult player evaluations as summer approaches for his athletes.

Chalmers, two years away from retiring as a Newport Harbor High social science teacher and department co-chair, enjoyed an extraordinary coaching career before retiring after the 2021 baseball season, enabling him to watch his kids play sports more often, including his son, Dayne, who played volleyball at UC Santa Barbara.

Dayne Chalmers, who also excelled in football and basketball at Newport Harbor and was good enough in baseball to be considered a potential collegiate player, might have been the only baseball player in Orange County history whose dad was the baseball coach at the school he attended, yet did not play baseball.

The 6-foot-4 Dayne Chalmers, one of the top volleyball players in CIF Southern Section in 2019, accepted a volleyball scholarship to play for the Gauchos in the Big West Conference, in which he starred for four years. Baseball and boys volleyball are both spring sports at the high school level and Dayne could only play one.

Evan Chalmers, cheerful, respectful, fair-minded and friendly as a coach, who has always been a pleasure to be around, started coaching football and baseball at Laguna Beach High in the late 1980s after graduating from San Diego State.

His first big break came when he was hired as an assistant baseball coach at Esperanza High under longtime Aztecs Coach Mike Curran.

A former multi-sport athlete at Laguna Beach, Chalmers has played or coached just about every sport – football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, you name it – but what separates Chalmers is his innate ability to communicate effectively with student-athletes and parents in a calm, gracious manner.

“Evan was a players’ coach – not a coach who would yell or scream. He was like all good coaches – an excellent teacher on the field who always was positive with the players,” said legendary former Newport Harbor football coach Jeff Brinkley, whom Chalmers coached under for eight glorious years during a time when the Sailors’ gridiron program was among the best in Orange County.

Brinkley coached Harbor’s football team for 32 years and reached a CIF championship game eight times with three section titles, and Chalmers served many roles, including as defensive coordinator. In a three-year stretch, the Tars played in two CIF title games, winning a section championship in 1999, and earned a trip to the CIF semifinals in 2001.

At Esperanza, Chalmers added football to his varsity coaching résumé in 1992 as the secondary coach and the Aztecs won a CIF championship. After coaching JV baseball at Esperanza, Chalmers was moved up to the varsity as an outfield and hitting coach under Curran as the Aztecs won a CIF title in the spring of 1993, giving Chalmers the unique distinction of winning two section championship rings in the same school year.

Later, Chalmers arrived at Newport Harbor, replacing Tony Ciarelli as the Sailors’ defensive coordinator and accepting a position as history teacher at the school. Chalmers started coaching baseball at Newport Harbor in 2002 under Joel Desguin, and four years later, became the Sailors’ head baseball coach.

Chalmers had two stints as Newport Harbor’s baseball coach, from 2006 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2021. In between those periods, Chalmers coached baseball at Corona del Mar under John Emme.

“Coaching at both (CdM and Newport), I was always able to see the other side of the coin, which is great,” Chalmers said.

Chalmers, who grew up in a volleyball hotbed at Laguna Beach and taught his children how to set, spike and dig, has picked up coaching basketball at the lower levels at Newport Harbor since retiring as baseball coach. He wouldn’t want it any other way.

Richard Dunn, a longtime sportswriter, writes the Dunn Deal column regularly for The Orange County Register’s weekly, The Coastal Current North.