Andrew Butcher, benchwarmer for Santa Barbara High School’s storied boys basketball team of 1976, never scored a point for the Dons.
But no one also has ever won more games from that same bench.
“If you got points for longevity,” Butcher mused, “I’d be a champion.”
The 63-year-old coach of the Santa Barbara High girls’ basketball team will guide the Dons into the Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions for the 40th time when they tip off against Camarillo at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
The 44th annual tournament has been around only slightly longer than Butcher.
“It’s got a good history,” he said. “Sue Bird played in it, and so did Lisa Leslie and Diane Taurasi and a few other players who continued on to the WNBA.”
The TOC started in Palm Springs in 1978 before moving to Santa Barbara in 1983 — the same year that Butcher and former Dons’ teammate Scott Blakey became the Dons’ co-head coaches.
It was a good time to tip off a career. Santa Barbara’s lineup that season featured future USC All-American Holly Ford as well as two others — Leslie Crandell and Amanda DeLucia — who would play NCAA Division 1 basketball. Those Dons won the TOC in December before advancing to the large-school semifinals of the CIF-Southern Section playoffs.
Butcher has since set a record for basketball coaching victories at Santa Barbara High. How many that is, however, he doesn’t exactly know.
“I think it’s over 700 — I haven’t counted in a long time, but it’s something like that,” he said. “At one point we were averaging 18 wins a year.
“But we’ve lost a heck of a lot, too.”
Butcher, who conducts the TOC with San Marcos High’s Aaron Solis, knows that defeats can be just as instructive as triumphs. He’s set up his 5-5 Dons to play in the tournament’s higher Gold Division even though three of his starters — Elle Stone, Lauren Robles and Dayzia Mendoza — are mere freshmen.
“We always play up,” he said. “I think we get a lot out of it. Some years we do well. We won it a couple of times, and got second and third some years, and some years we go 0-fer. But it seems to help us come together.
“We’re usually very competitive and respected. If we’re not winning games, we’re not wasting the other team’s time.”
Raising a Bracket
Camarillo, the Dons’ first-round opponent Tuesday, is 11-0 and ranked No. 9 in the CIF Southern Section’s Division 1. Scorpions’ star Gabriela Jaquez, younger sister of UCLA star Jaime Jaquez, will be following his footsteps to Westwood next year.
Other Gold Division games at J.R. Richards Gym on Tuesday pit St. Joseph against Ventura at 2:30 p.m., Righetti vs. Palisades at 4 p.m., and Chaminade against Maranatha Christian at 5:30 p.m.
Butcher has only three varsity lettermen returning from last year — three-time All-Channel League point guard Caia Trimble as well as fellow seniors Adlen Godinez and Stella Borgioli. Stone, the daughter of Santa Barbara football coach J.T. Stone, is the Dons’ leading scorer.
“They’re good kids and they’re coachable,” he said. “We’re chipping away.”
San Marcos, which also has a young team, will take an eight-game winning streak into its Green Division opener of the TOC. Coach Tiffany Simms’ Royals (8-2), ranked 16th in CIF-SS Division 3A, will play host to Orange Lutheran at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Other Green Division games at San Marcos include Nipomo against Newbury Park at 2:30 p.m., Oxnard vs. Mira Costa at 4 p.m., and Aliso Niguel against San Luis Obispo at 7 p.m.
“San Marcos has one of their stronger teams,” Butcher said, noting that junior guard Michelle Arellanes is coming off an MVP performance at the Fillmore Tournament. “They’ve got a lot of good sophomores and a senior point guard (Ariel Plourde).
“It’ll be fun going into league against them.”
Don of a Championship Era
Butcher and Blakey, who served together as co-coaches for five seasons, were teammates on a Santa Barbara boys team that was ranked No. 1 in the state for several weeks during the 1975-1976 season.
Two of their other teammates wound up playing Division 1 basketball — Eddie White at Gonzaga and Steve Crandell at Stanford — while James Hunter started for three seasons as a tight end for the USC football team.
“It was a pretty phenomenal team,” Butcher said. “Scott and I got to sit in the best seats in the house and learn a lot from coach (Jack) Trigueiro.”
Butcher was a student at UC Santa Barbara, only a year out of Santa Barbara High, when his sister told him that his alma mater needed a coach for its junior varsity girls team.
He had long been a student of the game. Butcher’s mother had even bought him a book — Red Auerbach’s Basketball — that she found in a thrift store when he was in the fourth grade.
“I was so excited,” he recalled. “It had a list of 25 tips.”
But his reaction to those tips would signal the type of coach he eventually became.
“Tip No. 1 was, ‘If a kid on the other team has an injury, remind him of it constantly,’” Butcher recalled. “It was 25 tricks. I couldn’t believe I was reading this. I was just shocked. I was so soured on the thing.”
He coached the Santa Barbara JVs for six seasons. He and Blakey then took over the varsity after Mike Valencia stepped down as head coach. It has since become a family affair for the Butchers, with even son Max lending his expert hand.
“He’s 19 now, and he’s hoping to go to UC Davis because they’ve got a real good graphics department,” Butcher said. “He just finished the T-shirt design for our tournament. I think it’s a great design and I’m sure the kids will love it.
“He has a lot of fun with it. That’s how we got into graphics originally. He made a Peabody Stadium shirt when he was 12 that people loved, and they sold them at the football games.”
Blakey stepped away after the 1987-1988 season, when a Dons’ team featuring Kristin Knapp, Faha Banks and Janelle Thompson advanced to the TOC final before losing to Leslie’s powerhouse Morningside High team.
By that time, the tournament had acquired a national sponsor and was signing some of America’s top-ranked teams to its 32-team draw.
“We’d get schools like (New York’s) Christ the King — the No. 1 team in the country … Get them hotel rooms and flights and stuff like that,” Butcher recalled. “You get a school like that, and other top teams want to come play in your tournament, too.
“We were nationally ranked when we had Knapp, Banks and Thompson on the team, and we got flown out that year to this giant national tournament in Altoona, Pennsylvania — with everything paid.”
Winning More Than Games
Things changed mightily for the Tournament of Champions two decades ago, however, when the CIF State office rewrote the rule book for tournament hosts.
“They said that if you give one team something, you have to give it to all the others in your tournament,” Butcher said. “Of course, we couldn’t afford that. That’s when all the big tournaments moved out of California.”
He won his last TOC championship in 2015 with Amber Melgoza, who would become an All-Pac-12 star at the University of Washington. Melgoza also led Butcher to his winningest season in 2014, when the 30-6 Dons won the CIF-SS 3AA championship and advanced to the State Division 3 final.
But like his number of career wins, he’s also lost track of how many of his players continued on to Division 1 basketball.
“At one point, I thought I’d coached 26 of them, but when I count, it never comes to 26,” he said with a laugh. “But we’ve had a lot of good players. When you have good players, you’re a good coach. And when you don’t, you get exposed.”
But while starring for UCSB’s nationally ranked program, Dons’ alumna Lisa Willett didn’t give the expected answer when asked what she had learned most from Butcher.
“I remember how, whenever we went to a fast-food restaurant, he would make sure we left our area cleaner than we found it,” she said. “I remember how he stressed never getting down on a teammate and always working to be a better person.
“He has a real handle on what’s important in life.”
Butcher has received countless letters of appreciation from his former players. One of the most surprising — and revealing —was sent several years ago by Alana Auld. She had appeared in just one summer league game in a Dons’ uniform before moving with her family to Florida.
She said his mentorship that day had inspired her to pursue a coaching career of her own. She now coaches high school volleyball in Florida.
“She only played the last three minutes of that summer league game,” Butcher recalled. “She said that I singled her out for her effort and how she had done what we’d worked on in the game plan.
“It just meant the world to her, and she wanted to come by and say hi and tell me about it.”
Auld made that visit with her sister two weeks ago.
“I had planned to send her a sweatshirt after receiving the letter but never did,” Butcher said. “My wife was going to kill me for forgetting.
“She has two kids, a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old, and so I gave her a stack of shirts and told her, ‘I’ll be out of the doghouse now.’”
Once a Don, Always a Don
Some of Butcher’s former players have come back to lend a hand. Carlina Gonzalez serves as his assistant while Banks coaches the Dons’ junior varsity.
“I couldn’t do it without them,” he said. “They do a lot of the organizing.”
Butcher admits that he’s had to change with the times. Old-school methods of discipline no longer work.
“Maybe the hardest thing in coaching now is keeping it fun,” he said. “You have kids who’ve had fun playing their whole life, and now all of a sudden it’s competition, wins and losses, and stats — so you’ve got to keep it loose.
“We do music at practice and try a lot of different things. It’s hard, because it can’t be a party, but we have to try to make it fun.”
It’s not yet time, however, for Butcher’s going-away party.
“People always ask me how much longer I’ll do this,” he said. “I always reply, ‘One more year.’”
He was never one for counting, anyway.
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.