At 81, Bill Brown still swims three times a week at the Orinda Country Club but if you want to say hi, you better get up early – he’s there at 5:45 a.m. It’s that kind of energy which built Miramonte into a water polo powerhouse that produced seven Olympians and 15 North Coast Section championships.
When Bill Brown stepped on the pool deck for his first Miramonte water polo practice, he told the players to divide into two teams and scrimmage.
“I told them I just wanted to get an idea of how good they were,” he said. “But really I had no idea how to play water polo. Or had even seen it.”
That was the fall of 1967. In 2012, he was named to the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame.
Along the way he coached six Olympians, five NCAA Players of the Year, and led Miramonte to 25 league titles and 15 North Coast Section championships. And obviously, he learned a little more about water polo.
Now 81, Brown finally stepped away from any form of coaching this past August, retiring from the Lamorinda Water Polo Club, but his legacy will live on. His role in creating the tradition that is Miramonte water polo not only includes the boys and men he coached, but also the powerhouse girls’ program, which he started in 1994.
So how did an Albany High School grad who played football and basketball at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo wind up spending much of his life dodging drops of chlorinated water?
He had learned to swim at the Berkeley YMCA, and one of his summer jobs was teaching swimming at the Canyon Swim Club in El Sobrante. Married after his junior year in college, Brown needed to keep his job in El Sobrante as well as find a teaching job, so he narrowed his search to high schools close to El Sobrante.
“My only interview was at Miramonte,” he said, “and it was the only job I ever had.”
For 39 years, Brown taught social studies at Miramonte and during his first year, was the freshman football coach and junior varsity basketball coach. (Tom Blackwood, another Miramonte coaching legend, was the head basketball coach at the time.)
But even though he was an experienced college football player, the varsity coach limited his role in the program, so when some swimmers approached him about coaching water polo, he was willing to listen.
One of those swimmers was Peter Schnugg, one of the seven Olympians and also a Hall of Famer, but there was more to the Schnugg impact than just Peter’s talent. There are 13 Schnugg siblings and they were a water polo-playing family that stocked the Miramonte roster for a generation. (And Maggie Steffens, a Monte Vista High School grad who will be shooting for her fifth Olympic team, is Peter’s niece.)
Of course there was more talent than just the Schnuggs, as close to 50 Miramonte athletes have gone to play the sport at Cal. And the other six Olympians – Drew McDonald, Jon Svendsen, Kirk Everist, Rick McNair and Drew Holland – obviously made a big difference at the high school level, but Brown’s success was based on more than just talent.
He was a tireless worker, studying strategy, focusing on technique, and always getting the best out of his players. His basketball background came in handy, as the two sports share many similarities.
“The players used to tease me that I just wanted to run basketball plays,” he said. “And early on, I did do a lot of walk-throughs on the basketball courts near the pool.”
But Brown quickly mastered water polo’s tactics, and coupled with ability to relate to his players, became one of the gurus of the sport.
“I was going to be a teacher/coach,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to do. I was just fortunate Rose supported me.”
Rose, his wife of 61 years, had to take a bigger role in raising son Jeff and daughter Keri to allow Brown to pursue his passion, and he referenced her willingness to let him coach more than once.
She did, however, put her foot down when he wanted to continue coaching basketball. That was simply too much, and so Brown focused solely on water polo – a path that led to not only his own success, but that of Miramonte and his many players.
And speaking of those players, they were all male until 1993. If girls wanted to play water polo, they had to try out for the boys’ team. But Brown helped the parents of the interested girls get the school district to authorize girls’ water polo – which allowed Heather Petri, yet another Miramonte water polo Olympian, get her start in the sport.
He also played a major role in Lamorinda’s storied presence in aquatics, developing rivalries with Acalanes and Campolindo that reverberate to this day.
And it all started as he sat by the shallow six-lane Miramonte swimming pool in the fall of 1967. “I was just trying to figure out how the game was played,” he said.
It’s fair to say, after nearly 60 years of almost unimaginable success, that he did a lot more than that.
