Coach Prieto’s Lasting Legacy: Baseball Field to be Named for Former Coach

Coach Rick Prieto stands under his Champion for Character coaching award in the gym.

On Saturday, March 7, Culver City High School will host a ceremony to rename our baseball field in honor of Coach Rick Prieto. The event will be a celebration of Prieto’s 31 years coaching baseball at CCHS and of the enduring relationships he has built in the program. He has been named CCHS Coach of the Year five times, and was awarded a CIF-Southern Section Jim Staunton Champion of Character award for his coaching in 2022. All CCHS students are invited to watch the dedication of the new sign and the varsity baseball game afterwards, and many of Prieto’s former players, who still keep in contact with their high school coach, will also attend the ceremony. 

“I still get calls from my players. I still watch my players who play baseball currently in college,” Prieto tells me, as we discuss his career, legacy, and relationships with players. “Some of them even have kids, and I get to meet them. Those are proud moments.”

Only two other CCHS athletics facilities have ever been named after former coaches (the Jerry Chabola stadium and the Del Goodyear Gymnasium), and getting spaces like these renamed is not easy. According to current Athletics Director Adam Eskridge, “you have to go through a lot of loops and jumps, and the school board has to approve it,” which requires a lot of public support.

The movement for Coach Prieto’s field was spearheaded by former Athletics Director Tom Salter, a close friend of Prieto’s. Salter reached out to countless past players and coaches, asking them to write letters or speak at the School Board Meeting in support of Coach Prieto. Salter received many responses, a testament to the amount of love and respect the CCHS baseball community still has for Prieto. Salter later assembled and gifted these letters to his friend. 

“I have a binder,” Coach Prieto describes, smiling, “of community members, former teammates and players over the years, and mentors who are still here and who are still friends of mine. I haven’t soaked it all in yet.”

No surprise, the School Board voted unanimously to approve the renaming in June.

For Rick Prieto, baseball and Culver City have always been intertwined. His family moved to Culver City in 1969, and he graduated from CCHS in 1974, playing baseball all four years of his high school career. He went on to play college baseball, and then to play professionally in Mexico, in Mexico City and in the town of Guasave in Sinaloa. There, Prieto was coached by Hall-of-Famer Tony Oliva, and his teammates included several future major-leaguers, including 2-time World Series Champion Randy Bush. “Baseball has really enrichened my life,” said Prieto. A few years after his professional career finished, Prieto decided to return to the sport and the town that he loved. He started coaching baseball at CCHS in 1991 and became Varsity Head Coach in 1994. He has been in Culver City ever since. 

Prieto retired from coaching in 2022, when his daughter (also a CCHS graduate) got married, though he continues to work as a PE coach. The new baseball Varsity Head Coach, Devaughn Wallace, is a former player of Prieto’s who graduated from CCHS in 2000. The two worked together closely when Wallace was an assistant coach, and Prieto remains involved in CCHS’ baseball program. “It’s hard to walk away from something I was a part of as a player and part of as a coach, running the program and then to have one of my former players there. We have a great relationship,” Prieto told me.

But Prieto’s contribution to Culver City Baseball goes even beyond coaching. “There have been many times when I’ve been running down Ballona Creek on a Saturday,” said Mr. Eskridge, “and he was out there working on the field, and mowing and seeding . . . He just put a tremendous amount of care into the facilities, into his players, and into the program. He was an example to all of us.”

In Prieto’s words, “It’s very important when another team walks in, they see a well-groomed field and they think, wow, that team must be well-groomed too.” Though he was forced to take several months off from teaching last school year due to a health scare and is technically retired from coaching, Prieto still puts in 4-6 hours a week doing field maintenance, and plans on putting in even more time once he retires from teaching.

Standing in the Del Goodyear Gymnasium, Coach Rick Prieto wears a large, contagious smile and a T-shirt proclaiming “My Favorite People Call Me Grandpa” along with a photo of him with his two granddaughters.  How does it make you feel, I ask, the whole renaming and ceremony?

“It hasn’t really hit me yet . . .  but I’m honored,” he replies, eyes filling with tears. “I hope I can thank everybody.”