Greg Hansen: Pima CC having elite season across all sports, even by Aztecs’ lofty standards

Perhaps it’s Arizona’s junior college league, the ACCAC — from Yuma to Thatcher, Prescott to Tucson — a league that plays in relative obscurity, with no TV coverage, few newspaper headlines and fewer Twitter clicks.

Maybe the Pima Aztecs are having a better athletic season, 2022-23, than UCLA or Stanford or any Pac-12 school.

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” says expressive Pima College athletic director Jim Monaco. “I cannot truly say we’ve had this kind of success since I’ve been around Pima the last 24 years.”

Monaco is not exaggerating. I did the research. In 51 years as an athletic entity, Pima has rarely, if ever, put a season like this in the books, top to bottom.

The Aztecs have 13 sports, men’s and women’s. They’ve had one losing season (volleyball). The other 12 have either reached the NJCAA finals (men’s soccer, women’s soccer, men’s cross country, women’s basketball) or played in or are currently playing deep into the region playoffs.

PCC’s baseball team is having its best season in 30 years. Its men’s track team won the region championship last week. So did Pima’s men’s golf team. The women’s golf team has the NJCAA’s leading golfer, Maria Harrouch, who has won six consecutive tournaments entering this week’s national finals.

It seems like every morning I open my email inbox and find a message from Ray Suarez, Pima’s sports information director, with a headline that goes something like this:

Women’s soccer NJCAA All-Americans and Region I champions Amparano and Buntin sign four-year letters-of-intent.

“The number of teams going to nationals is more than we’ve ever had,” says Jerry Stitt, Pima’s executive assistant athletic director. “The baseball and softball teams are in the regional finals this week. You name it: Track, basketball, soccer, golf. It’s been a very good year.”

The Aztecs are doing so in the wickedly difficult ACCAC, which is possibly the top junior-college league in America. Here’s some context:

The Pac-12 rightfully boasts that it has won 500 NCAA championships across the last century. That’s a league with 12 schools and an average of 24 sports per school.

The ACCAC has won 156 NJCAA championships over the last 45 years, with many fewer title opportunities. The average ACCAC school has just eight sports. It is indeed a league of champions.

Central Arizona College has won 19 cross-country/track-and-field national titles and 12 in softball. Phoenix College has won 11 national titles in softball alone.

Mesa College has won 20 NJCAA championships, and Paradise Valley College has won 13. Yavapai College, Scottsdale College, South Mountain College and Glendale College have combined for 41 national championships.

And yet Pima College, which operates on a shoestring athletic budget of $1.91 million per year, is probably having a better year than any of them.

“There’s no such thing as an easy touch in this league,” says Monaco, who was Pima College’s head football coach until the league abandoned that sport in 2018. “I’m blessed.

“In a year we’ve been so good in all the sports, we had a combined 3.41 GPA last semester. Our coaches and our student-athletes make me look good, and all I’m doing is driving the bus.”

This didn’t happen by accident. Pima College is perhaps the nation’s top NJCAA soccer school — it played host to the national championships in 2022 and will do so again this year — because it has two Hall of Fame-level coaches, Kendra Veliz and David Cosgrove, both of whom have been at the school for more than 20 years.

Its nationally relevant basketball coaches, Todd Holthaus and Brian Peabody, have both won more than 500 career games in Tucson coaching careers that go back more than two decades. Its baseball coach, Ken Jacome, is from Tucson’s leading baseball family tree, a winner who began coaching almost 30 years ago.

And, clearly, Monaco hit it out of the park three years ago when he hired Chad Harrison to be the Aztecs’ track-and-field coach. Harrison, whose program includes more than 90 men’s and women’s athletes, has won two of the last three region championships.

“I got a lot of blowback when I hired Chad,” says Monaco. “That was nuts. They should’ve fired me if I had not hired him. He’s all passion and drive. He’s as intent on his kids’ classroom success as he is on what they do on the field.”

Monaco does this with probably the smallest administrative staff imaginable.

Stitt, Arizona’s former head baseball coach, is his executive assistant. Shonda James is an assistant to Monaco, but she’s also an assistant track coach. Holthaus doubles as the women’s basketball coach and an assistant AD. Vince Majalca is a one-man compliance/eligibility department.

Outside of Monaco’s office there’s Keith Martin, the operations director; Dan Bithell, the volleyball coach and coordinator of events, equipment and facilities; trainers April Jessee, Becky Fajardo and Kilee Hagerstrand.

Compare that to the typical Pac-12 athletic support staff of 100 to 150.

Nobody’s getting rich in PCC athletics. There are no $300,000-a-year associate ADs or million-dollar head coaches.

“We’re paid like school teachers,” says Monaco. “We don’t throw money at problems because we don’t have any money. Yet our coaches work 24/7. Half of our assistant coaches are volunteers. That’s how it works.”

Earlier this week, Monaco drove to Arizona Western College in Yuma to attend a semi-annual ADs conference.

Before he left, he helped to monitor an irrigation/sprinkler issue at PCC’s baseball field. While in Yuma, he picked up four dozen baseballs needed for the region championships this week at the Aztecs’ facility. He also spent hours trying to figure out a workable travel schedule if PCC’s baseball team wins the region title and must hurry off to Colorado or Nebraska next weekend.

“To make this work, you have to be a Swiss Army Knife,” says Monaco. “That’s why we’ve had a year like this.”