A Saintly makeover: Santa Maria High School upgrades athletic facilities as part of sports revival

Santa Maria High School may be best known in local prep sports circles as the perennial bottom-of-the-pack finisher in the Los Padres League.

Brian Wallace, the school’s second-year athletic director, is doing his damnedest to turn that lowly reputation around.

“We’re trying to be competitive and provide a better experience for our kids,” Wallace told the Sun.

When he took the job as athletic director in 2014, Wallace knew he had a stiff challenge in front of him. The Saints are stuck in a prolonged sporting drought; many of its teams haven’t been competitive in years. Wallace noted that that wasn’t always the case.

“Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, Santa Maria High had really good athletics,” Wallace said. “Then a different clientele came in that didn’t care as much about sports. People stopped investing money and resources [in athletics]. We fell behind a little bit.”

That lack of investment from adults understandably trickled down to the students. Part of the problem facing Wallace now is that enthusiasm among students for their sports teams has diminished significantly over the years.

Just ask Dan Ellington, Santa Maria’s second-year football coach. Ellington noticed students’ apathy toward sports as soon as he arrived on campus.

“The attitude toward athletics in general from the students was negative, unlike at [other] schools that I’ve worked at before,” Ellington said. “It’s like you weren’t cool if you played sports.”

Looking for ways to revitalize the sports community, Wallace decided to lead a makeover of the athletic facilities on campus, because, well, what’s more attractive to a teenager than fancy new stuff?

“Kids notice new stuff,” Wallace shrewdly realized.

Wallace worked tirelessly for two years finding various ways to upgrade Santa Maria High’s athletic facilities.

With the help of some funding from the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District, Wallace was able to relocate and rebuild the weight room and unveil a new wrestling room and golf practice room.

Limited by the existing facilities on campus, Wallace had to get creative. He found a gem in an old woodworking room of 3,200 square feet, which transformed into a spacious and well-endowed weight room. 

The old weight room was then repurposed into a full-time wrestling room. What used to be a cramped, underequipped weight room is now an adequately sized wrestling room, beautifully decorated with red, black, and white padding and Santa Maria Saints logos.

“The kids and I did most of the work,” Wallace beamed. “The weight room was finished first, then the golf room, and now the wrestling room. And we’re not getting close to being done yet.”

Santa Maria sports teams are already getting great use out of the new amenities, particularly the weight room, which is used every morning of the school week by the football team.

“The weight room used to be so small that we actually had to go in two groups; we did it in two sessions,” football coach Ellington said. “[The new weight room] gives us enough space to get the whole program in at one time. We have 40 to 50 kids in there every day consistently.”

Junior offensive lineman Elijah Fisher is one of the football players enjoying the new weight room every morning.

“It’s affecting our team a lot,” Fisher told the Sun. “We can fit a lot more guys in there, and a lot more weights. It being new and bigger, it pushes our guys.”

Now that the players are putting in more work, they’re starting to see the results.

“We’ve gotten a lot stronger,” Fisher said. “I was pretty weak last year, but this year I’ve gotten a lot stronger.”

“I feel like [the weight room] is influencing us,” Fisher added. “We’re getting a lot more people who are committed that go, that are on time, than we used to.”

Fisher embodies the renewed enthusiasm that Wallace and the coaches were hoping for and are continuing to see from a number of student athletes responding to the improvements at their school.

“What it’s doing more than anything else is creating excitement in our program,” Ellington said. “That [negative] attitude is completely turning around. It has a huge part to do with what Brian [Wallace]’s been doing in getting new facilities. The kids can see that we’re building something and they want to be part of it. It’s catching fire.”

The impact thus far is exactly what the coaches were looking for. All is going as planned.

“It’s a great feeling; that’s why I came over to Santa Maria—to turn it around,” Ellington said. “I think I got here at a perfect time.” 

Contributor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Apr 7-14, 2016.