Softball head coach Jim Maier enters the 2023 softball season. Photo courtesy of The Bulletin archive.
By Raymond Castillo, Staff Reporter
The fresh cut grass, the birds chirping, and the sun shining bright are just a few things that keep California State University, Dominguez Hills softball head coach Jim Maier grounded when preparing to enter his 40th season coaching, 17th overall at CSUDH, compiling over 600 wins.
Maier enters the 2023 season fresh off the deepest run in program history, an NCAA West Regional Title followed by an appearance in the NCAA Division II National Championship. Yet, he does not let success cloud what he does day in and day out. “Every day is gameday,” said Maier.
Winning is the most important thing in sports and sustained winning is the hardest. Some programs flash a run deep into the playoffs once in a while, while others like Oklahoma softball and the New England Patriots of the NFL have consistently made deep runs into the playoffs and won their fair share of championships. Every coach, player, executive, and even fan has their own idea on how to build a winner. The ideas range from hoarding the most talented athletes, building the grandest facilities, or stacking an easy schedule to look better than the team actually is, but all have one thing in common, a good culture.
What exactly is a good culture? Why does everyone say it is necessary to build a sustained winner, but yet it is so subjective to each person?
To Maier it’s simple, “Get the best athlete available, bring them in and show them you care.” Showing them he cares is displayed in the way Maier runs his team. To him, “Culture is not something you put on the wall, it’s something you do every day.”
“We’ve won over 70 percent of our games,” said Maier, “it isn’t an accident.”
Maier harps on the small details such as greeting anyone who walks into the room they are in, being humble and offering to help the community in any way possible. He tells his team all the time, “Be a killer on the field, but a girl scout in the community.”
By raising killers on the field and girl scouts in the community, Maier has won two California Collegiate Athletics Association championships, two CIF Southern Division championships (1988,2014), and made ten NCAA playoff appearances, and seven CCAA tournament appearances including the most recent run to the NCAA Division II championship last season.
As his biography on the CSUDH Athletics website reads, “Jim Maier and (CSUDH) softball go hand-in-hand.”
He does not stop at just softball, until recently, he was also CSUDH’s interim athletics director.“Mainly I was just there to hold the ship,” Maier said. “Mainly I was just there for morale, showing up, letting them know that I’m here for them.” Holding the ship is an understatement as he had to oversee 10 collegiate athletics teams, (four men’s and six women’s) all while still coaching, recruiting, and managing his own team.
Maier brought his “every day is gameday” mentality to the front office of the athletics department, and was able to accomplish great things for the department as a whole while there such as summer housing for student-athletes, and an overall emphasis on team grade point average were issues for the department before Maier took the helm.
Maier has since given way to the newly hired athletics director, Eric McCurdy but the foundation of what Maier started is still being built upon. McCurdy agreed saying, “Jim has done some really great things for the softball team and athletics program as a whole while he’s been here, and I look forward to building upon what he started.”
Maier’s softball team has impressively never had below a collective 3.0 GPA during his tenure as head coach. That is something he prides himself on because he knows education is the ticket for most of his players.
“We bring in players from all walks of life,” Maier said, “We don’t know everything that a person will do, but we do know that they will be educated before they do anything.”
Maier encourages his players to branch out and find what interests them outside of softball because “not everyone can play forever.” Maier has coached future doctors, lawyers, executives, and even future coaches that ended up on his staff.
Stephanie Guerra, Lexi Madrid, and Katie Garcia who make up the coaching staff alongside his son Jared Maier are all former players of Jim’s at CSUDH.
Even though he has countless wins, Maier says he’s most proud of the promises he’s made to the parents and has kept them. “It’s a really big deal. I get these kids at 17 sometimes, 18 years old and their parents are trusting me with their prized possession, their baby. Yeah, it’s a big deal,” he said.
Coach Maier does not take lightly his responsibility to protect those children and infuse them with all the best knowledge of life. He makes promises to the parents that he will not only make their children better softball players but upstanding citizens.
“That’s why every day I make sure that we do the little things, we say hello to the maintenance person, the secretary, everyone is big time around here”.
Maier knows that culture and attitude do not matter if you do not win. “If you don’t win, you don’t have a job,” he said. That mentality is what drives coach Maier to be the best that he can be. It drives him to push his team to reach their full potential and even push past it.
As coach Maier said, “It’s the little things that matter in the race.”
The little things have won Jim Maier over 600 collegiate games and nearly 1,000 total. The little things are what made 6 All-Americans, 28 All-West Region players, and 79 All-CCAA players including two CCAA MVPs, one CCAA Freshman of the Year, and one CCAA Newcomer of the Year under his watch.
The little things matter and every day is gameday under Jim Maier.
