GALT LEGEND HATZENBUHLER DIES AT 85
GALT — Erv Hatzenbuher, who coached many Galt High football teams to league and Sac-Joaquin Section titles during two different tenures, died Thursday morning at the age of 85.
According to Pat Maple, a Galt Joint Union High School board of trustee member, a friend of the family texted Maple on Thursday morning. Maple said she was told Hatzenbuhler’s wife, Betty, tried to wake Erv up, but he was unresponsive.
“I started getting teared up,” Maple said.
In the middle of October, Hatzenbuhler, who also taught physical educational classes at Galt High for more than 30 years, told the News-Sentinel he had recovered from pneumonia. Zach Orman, running back on this year’s Galt High football team, was on the verge and broke the school’s all-time rushing record set by Mark Hatzenbuhler, Erv’s son, between 1987-89. Erv planned to attend Galt’s game on Oct. 14 in which Orman broke the record. But because of his recent illness, plus rainstorms hitting the region that week, the elder Hatzenbuhler chose to stay home.
After he retired from coaching Galt football following the 2005 season, Hatzenbuhler still attended Warrior football games from 2006 to this past season at Erv Hatzenbuhler Field, which was named after him during the ’06 season, at Warrior Stadium.
“He’d always sit at the end zone and watched the games,” said Liberty Ranch Athletic Director Janice Williams, who has known him since the midlate 1960s. “He was a community person.”
Maple and John Williams, the Sierra Valley Conference commissioner who lives in Galt, had recent conversations with Hatzenbuhler. Both men said he sounded just fine, and was looking forward to returning to the golf courses to play golf once the weather started warming up again.
“I spoke to him on the phone about two, three weeks ago,” Maple said.
Galt High is scheduled to have its sports hall of fame early next year, where Hatzenbuhler and his son would be inducted.
“We were getting his records, and what things he wanted me to say about him,” Maple said.
John Williams has known Hatzenbuhler for nearly 50 years. Growing up in Galt, Williams played baseball for Hatzenbuhler, who ran the Warriors’ program from 1968 until 1973.
“He was very intense,” Williams said. “If you were a kid in the Galt area in the late 1960s, early 1970s, you wanted to play for Erv.”
Williams said he got to know Hatzenbuhler more when he was Sports Editor at The Galt Herald throughout most of the 1980s.
“He was one of those rare individuals who was bigger than life,” said Williams of Hatzenbuhler. “He drove kids to play hard.”
From 1967 to 1989, and 2003 to 2005, Hatzenbuhler ran the Galt High football program. In his second tenure, he led
the 2004 and ’05 teams to an 8-3-1 and 6-4 records, respectively, before he retired after the ’05 season. The ’04 team advanced into the second round of the section’s Division II playoffs.
Prior to returning to the Galt football program, Hatzenbuhler was defensive coordinator at Bear Creek and Franklin. He also served as an assistant coach at Lodi High in the mid-1990s. He took a year off from coaching football in 1996 to run, and was successfully elected, to the Galt Joint Union Elementary School board of trustees. He served three terms through 2008. In 1994 and
’95, he coached the Galt High frosh-soph football team that had a combined record of 19-1.
Janice Williams, who was the Galt High athletic director during the 2004-05 school year, started teaching and coaching Galt High’s varsity volleyball team in 1980.
“He was very disciplinary and his conditioning was hard,” recalled Williams. “But, those kids would be ready for the fourth quarter.”
Maple added, “He just genuine guy. Like other dads, he was rough, but other times he was very kind.”