Telepeer

Dunn: Corona del Mar boys basketball have a history of winning

March 19, 2026

Corona del Mar High has always featured a strong boys basketball team. This year is the 50th anniversary of the only CdM squad, however, to finish a regular season undefeated.

As America was celebrating its bicentennial in 1976, the Sea Kings completed an amazing seven-year run under Coach Tandy Gillis, who elevated the program from good to great.

Sparked by the defense of standout big man Alex Black, who averaged scoring 16.2 points per game and dominated the boards, the Sea Kings rolled to a 25-0 record in the regular season and won their fourth league championship under Gillis, who was hired as the Orange Coast College men’s basketball coach the next year.

There has been abundant success for Corona del Mar basketball throughout the decades, but the 1976 team stands alone in regular-season perfection.

“In 1976 we were 25-0 and undefeated, but lost our first-round playoff game to Muir (59-49),” Gillis once said. “That Muir team should have been seeded No. 1. They went on to the CIF finals. But we had some other really good teams at Corona del Mar. In ’72 the team was 23-3 and in ’73 we were 26-2. In those years, we had Casey Jones, Matt Keough and Jeff Wharton.”

At Corona del Mar, Gillis led the Sea Kings to Irvine League titles in 1970, ’72 and ’73, and a Century League championship in ’76.

“Tandy Gillis, who’d won an NCAA championship and played for Pete Newell (at Cal), gave us all that instruction and teaching, and taught us how to play basketball, how to conduct ourselves in our lives and we were very fortunate to have that gathering of people,” said Jones, a two-time All-CIF point guard for the Sea Kings who played four years at USC under Coach Bob Boyd and eight years of professional basketball in Australia.

Multi-talented athlete Keough, a shortstop in baseball at CdM, became a major league pitcher and American League All-Star for the Oakland A’s.

Gillis, a no-nonsense, hard-nosed coach who emphasized pressure defense, is best known for his coaching achievements at Orange Coast.

At OCC, Gillis guided the Pirates for 16 seasons from 1977 to 1992, compiling 244 wins, the most of any men’s basketball coach in school history. Orange Coast won the 1979 state championship, a feat Gillis considered his top coaching accolade, because the team featured all local players and surprised many.

Among the stars were Estancia High products Ray Orgill and Pete Neumann and two-time U.S. Olympic indoor volleyball gold medalist and Olympic Games tournament MVP Steve Timmons (Newport Harbor).

“That was the ultimate team,” Gillis once said of the ’79 Pirates. “Eight guys that would compete you to death. I tell you what, if Steve Timmons wanted to, he could have been an NBA player. He was that talented, but he liked volleyball better. I think it still worked out pretty good for him, though.”

Gillis, who took over as the OCC men’s tennis coach after coaching basketball, was inducted in the Orange Coast College Athletic Hall of Fame in 2010. He died in 2024 at age 85.

There have been two Corona del Mar teams with only one loss in the regular season: This year’s squad under Coach Jason Simco and the 1968 team under Coach Bill Bloom, which won the Irvine League championship and finished 26-1 in the regular season, losing only to Marina, 62-48, in the Sea Kings’ fifth game of the campaign.

Bloom’s Sea Kings ended 28-2 in ’68, the highest win total in school history. They lost to Marina again, 48-45, in overtime in the quarterfinals of the CIF Southern Section playoffs.

This year, Simco’s Sea Kings were 27-1 in the regular season. They claimed the Sunset League title, going undefeated in 12 games, and were selected for the elite CIF Open Division in the postseason, in which they lost to private-school powers Crespi, Sierra Canyon and St. John Bosco in a state play-in game.

Prior to the playoffs, the Sea Kings’ only loss came against Lake Washington (Washington), 87-82, in double overtime in a Desert Holiday Classic championship game on Dec. 30.

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

Orange County Register

News Details

Dunn: Corona del Mar boys basketball have a history of winning

News

CONTACT INFO

QUICK LINKS

SERVICES

CURRENT NEWS