Esquer feeling at home at Stanford
Ex-Cal baseball coach returns to his roots, replacing Marquess
Before announcing his plan to retire after a farewell season on The Farm just over a year ago, Stanford baseball head coach Mark Marquess picked up the phone and reached out to one of his former pupils, David Esquer.
“And I asked him one question, ‘Coach, are you good with that? Because if you’re good with that, I’m good with that,’” Esquer recalled. “I didn’t want it to be mitigating circumstances or someone pushing him out . ... And then my mind never went that I would be the next one.””
Esquer’s path came full circle last week after he was hired to replace his former mentor inside the dugout at Sunken Diamond.
The 52-year-old took part in an introductory news conference Tuesday morning, with a short commute to campus, considering he spent the previous 18 seasons across the Bay as the head coach at Cal.
“I’ll be honest, it happened fairly quickly,” Esquer said. “When I mention even to my former players, I literally was at my desk on Wednesday recruiting and getting ready for baseball camp to start, and then by Wednesday afternoon my life was probably turned sideways given an opportunity to come to the greatest university — the only place that could pull me away from where I was.”
Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir received permission from Cal a couple of weeks ago to interview Esquer and quickly met with one of the school’s top candidates following a national search.
“I talked to a number of people obviously in the collegiate baseball community — even in the major leagues, as well, too — just to get ideas, names, thoughts,” Muir said. “And then we obviously went right over the Bay and said, ‘This is our guy.’ And we’re very excited to bring him back here to The Farm.”
Football
Cal head coach Justin Wilcox announced that junior punter Steven Coutts, redshirt freshman offensive lineman Valentino Daltoso and junior long snapper Alonso Vera have signed financial aid agreements and will join the school’s football program. Coutts played the last two seasons at Louisiana, while Daltoso redshirted his true freshman campaign for Oregon in 2016. Vera played in all 11 games as a sophomore last season at Long Beach City College.
Tennis
Two former world No. 1 players on the comeback trail, Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka, will be the top draws at the Bank of the West Classic women’s tennis tournament set for July 31-Aug. 1 at Stanford’s Taube Family Tennis Center.
Sharapova, 30, recently returned from a 15-month doping suspension after she tested positive and confessed to using the banned hormone meldonium early last year. She is a five-time Grand Slam champion and has won 35 Women’s Tennis Assn. (WTA) titles in her career. Azarenka, who will turn 28 on the first day of this year’s Bank of the West, is a two-time Grand slam champion who will be making her fifth Bay Area appearance and her first in the U.S. since giving birth to a son in December. She returned to the WTA Tour in April.