OCC honors five
Brent Mayne, who played 15 Major League Baseball seasons for seven teams, headlines five individuals who will be inducted into the Orange Coast College Athletics Hall of Fame on Saturday.
The 2010 class also includes former coaches Mike Mayne, Tandy Gillis and Vern Wagner, as well as former women’s tennis standout Julie (Slattery) Shapiro.
The inductees will be honored at a reception in the OCC gymnasium foyer, beginning at 4:30 p.m. and will also be recognized at halftime of the school’s home football game against Southwestern, with kickoff set for 7 p.m.
Brent Mayne played one season at OCC, before moving on to become an All-American at Cal State Fullerton and a first-round draft pick (13th overall) of the Kansas City Royals in 1989. He collected 1,143 hits, 38 home runs and 403 runs batted in in 1,279 big-league games with the Royals, New York Mets,Oakland Athletics, San Francisco Giants, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers. He finished with a .263 career batting average and his .993 fielding percentage ranks fourth all-time among catchers.
Mayne, a Costa Mesa High product, was inducted into the OCC Hall of Fame in 2005.
Mike Mayne, Brent’s father, amassed 400 wins in 15 seasons as the Pirates baseball coach, including a state championship in 1980. Mayne’s teams won six conference championships and featured more than 100 future professional players, including future major leaguers Chris Beasley, Donnie Hill, Damon Berryhill, Kevin Romine, Kevin Reimer, Jeff Gardner and Rich Amaral.
Also an assistant football coach at OCC for more than 12 years, Mayne was the pitching coach for 2008 NCAA champion Fresno State. He also worked in scouting and coaching roles for the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics.
He was National Community College Coach of the Year in 1980 and was inducted into the California Community College Coaches Assn. Hall of Fame in 1993.
Gillis, who coached the school’s only men’s basketball state champion in 1978-79, compiled a 244-228 record in 16 seasons at the helm, beginning in 1976.
Gillis, a member of the 1959 Cal team that won the NCAA championship, as well as the Golden Bears’ 1960 squad that lost in the national title game to an Ohio State team that included John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and Bobby Knight, also coached men’s tennis for eight seasons at OCC.
He is a member of the California Community College Hall of Fame.
Wagner was head wrestling coach and an assistant football coach at OCC from 1971 to 1981. An assistant on the 1975 national championship football team, Wagner went on to an administrative career at several universities, including UC Irvine. After working at the University of Washington from 1987 to 1994, he became dorector of the Seattle Kingdome, home to the Seattle Seahawks and Seattle Mariners. He died of leukemia in 2000 at the age of 63.
Shapiro, whose maiden name is Slattery, is one of only four to be named OCC Athlete of the Year twice. She won state singles and doubles (with partner Natalie Hastings) in 1988 and won another state doubles crown in 1989, when she was second in the state in singles.
She later helped Cal Poly Pomona win a Division II national championship and was a two-time All-American for the Broncos. She was national runner-up in singles both years at Cal Poly Pomona.
She was Senior National Player of the Year and won the Arthur Ashe Sportsmanship Award.
— From staff reports