Faculty Spotlight
MR. RON JACOBS by Sherrie Basch Stelik (’72)
Coach Ron Jacobs taught typing, baseball, and basketball at MHS from 1969 to 1976. Thereafter, he coached basketball for five years at El Camino, 1974-79, and one year at Loyola-Marymount, where he was named Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year. On May 1, 2008, Ron was inducted into the El Camino College Hall of Fame. He is one of the few inductees who was both an ECC star athlete and a title-winning Coach (while he was a student at El Camino in 1961 and 1962, he ran track and cross country). The dinner and ceremony were held at the Palos Verdes Country Club. I was seated with Jim Harrick and Dave Brown (both MHS Faculty), and other MHS alumni including Ben Haxton (’62) and Jack Rumbaugh (’61). The award was presented by one of Ron’s players, Steve Shaw, a 1997 ECC Hall of Fame inductee and was accepted by Jim Harrick on Ron’s behalf. After his stint at Loyola, Ron was recruited by the Ambassador of the Philippines to the USA to overhaul the national basketball program of the Philippines. While coaching in the Philippines, he engineered his team’s first-ever four-game sweep in a best-of-seven titles series in the Philippine Basketball Association. On December 22, 2001, just five days before his 59th birthday, Coach Jacobs suffered a massive stroke. He is wheelchair-bound and his movements are severely limited, but he communicates fairly well and he continues to make progress. On April 8, 2007, he was inducted into the Philippines Basketball Association Hall of Fame for revolutionizing coaching in the Philippines. He currently resides in Pasig, the Philippines. Former MHS faculty member, Dave Brown, went to Manila in October 2008 to visit Ron. Ron was very pleased when Dave presented him with his El Camino Hall of Fame plaque, awards program, and his Hall of Fame t-shirt. Dave also presented Ron with an MHS Favorite Coach plaque.
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