Father knows best
Chris Acosta has helped mold daughters Jessica and Danica into champions
EL CENTRO — Years ago, Chris Acosta was adamant he would leave the Valley and never return once he the finished high school.
The Valley native is a 1989 Central Union High School graduate and a former standout at shortstop on the Spartan baseball team.
And yet almost 30 years later, here he is, back at his alma mater coaching his daughters, Danica and Jessica, in softball while they play the same position at which he excelled as a teen.
“Life happens while you’re making plans,” Acosta said.
After graduating from CUHS, Acosta played ball at the University of Redlands for a year. He then lived in San Diego for a few years.
He was back home for a wedding when he met Cathy, the future Mrs. Acosta. Eventually the couple returned to the Valley and have raised their kids her.
There are three of them in all, the third being son, C.J., age 12.
While Acosta has always been active in his kids’ athletic endeavors, his involvement reached a new level when Jessica entered Central as a freshman four years ago and made the varsity team. That’s when he decided to join the high school’s program himself as co-head coach.
Now that Jessica’s graduated and on her way to Ole Miss, her dad plans to stick around Central for the sake of Danica, who’ll be a freshman this year.
The opportunity to coach at Central wasn’t planned. Although Acosta had been coaching Jessica’s teams since she was around 8 or 9 years old while she was in the Imperial Valley Girls’ Softball League, he stopped officially coaching her teams when she was about 12 and began playing travel ball.
As Jessica’s freshman season at CUHS began, Marissa Guzman, the team’s sole head coach at the time and a former Central player herself, asked Acosta if he’d be interested in helping to coach the team, as she was in need of a helping hand.
He agreed, as he wanted to support Jessica, and because the talented class of freshman players coming in were
Jessica’s teammates growing up.
“I knew I would have the girls who would understand it, because they heard that voice when they were, 8, 9 years old,” Acosta said. “Then I wasn’t with them for a while, then when they heard that voice again, they responded. And I enjoyed it.”
Acosta said he felt that he could bring a different brand of softball to CUHS that other players on the team weren’t used to.
He developed this brand by listening to and watching Jessica’s and Danica’s travel softball coaches.
Acosta also wanted to be front and center so he could ensure his eldest child stayed sharp and played the same way she does on her travel team.
“Whenever he got chosen for the softball head coach at Central, it was kind of like bringing back old times,” Jessica said of her father. “Because it had been a couple of years since he had coached me.”
Four years in, the “co-head coach” titles still remain in place for Guzman and Acosta, as the two both have a mutual respect for each other and neither wants to claim the title outright.
“I’ll never forget the first day of practice,” Acosta said. “I walked up to her (Guzman) and I asked her, ‘So what’re we going to do today?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, you’re the coach.’”
While Acosta became co-head coach to help Jessica and the team, there have been a number of fond father-daughter memories created along the way.
“Sometimes we don’t see eye to eye on things, but I really enjoyed having him because he always kept me honest,” Jessica said of her father. “He always made sure that I was striving for greatness each time that I stepped on the field. He never let me be mediocre.”
Together, father and daughter helped the team finish with winning records the past three years, had a championship game appearance and even appeared on the 2019 All-Imperial Valley League list together — Acosta shared Coach of the Year between himself, Guzman and Brawley’s Kevin Kerns, and Jessica earned first team honors.
Although Acosta and his wife have both been active in their daughters’ softball pursuits, he said they didn’t necessarily push them into that sport. Instead, he said, the couple wanted their daughters to be in competitive environment.
It just so happened that softball provided that environment, and it was something at which both girls excelled.
“It could’ve been soccer; it could’ve been volleyball,” he said.
The Acostas also have all of their kids involved in 4-H, where they compete in raising animals.
“We’ve always just wanted them to be in an environment where it’s hard, because when you get in the real world, it’s not easy,” Acosta said. “And we want to put them in front of things that they might fail at, or they might win at, to learn that there’s that balance that you can’t get too high, and you can’t get too low. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy.”
Likewise, the Acostas hoped that Danica and Jessica learn from the rigor that travel softball requires, such as having practice at 8 a.m. in Orange County.
“Danica’s team, I think, right now is ranked No. 2 in the country,” Chris said. “Jessica’s team ranked No. 1 in the country, in their respective age groups. We’ve always put them in that environment because, A. they obviously have the talent to do it, but B. we want to make sure they knew that they’re always playing against the best every weekend.”
Certainly, Jessica will be playing against many of the best next season at NCAA Division I University of Mississippi.
“I’m looking forward to how she responds to a different coach,” Acosta said. “A lot of the things that I’ve been screaming at her about for the past eight years is going to do two things: It’s going to reinforce her that, ‘Hey, my dad knew what he was talking about,’ and that my delivery might’ve been different, but this coach is probably telling her the same thing.”
Acosta said he would like to stop coaching at Central once Danica finishes school in 2024.
“I feel Danica is on the same path as Jessica is and has that caliber (of talent) to go on to college and play,” he said. “I’m biased, but she definitely has D-I talent, D-I interest, already as a freshman. And I want to be able to leave on the weekends if she happens to be playing on the West Coast. Or if she goes to a West Coast school, be able to go see her.”