Onetime PC Great Honored At Golf Tournament
VALLEY CENTER (9-26-2014) -- Jack Wiland, one of Palomar's premier all-around athletes back "in the day" who returned to serve as an assistant coach for the Comets in both baseball and football, was honored at the Second Annual Palomar Alumni Golf Tournament last week at Woods Valley Golf Club.
Wiland, who is retired from teaching and living in Desert Hot Springs, CA, where he still coaches the boys and girls golf teams at Desert Hot Springs High School, played football for the Comets under the late head coach Bob Bowman and baseball under the late Ward "Rusty" Myers.
In baseball, the former multi-sport star at Assumption High School in Davenport, Iowa, hit .360 for the Comets as a sophomore in 1961, slugging nine home runs which stood as the Palomar record for 20 years until it was broken during the 1981 season. Wiland hit .447 in the old South Central Conference during the '61 season, a mark that still ranks ninth on the all-time Palomar list. During that season, he also compiled a 6-2 win-loss record as a pitcher for the Comets.
Moving on to the University of Iowa on a baseball scholarship, Wiland compiled an 11-2 win-loss pitching record over two seasons and was Most Valuable Player of the 1963 team, which finished one game behind champion Illinois in the Big Ten standings. The '63 Hawkeyes were ranked as high as 11th in the nation.
As a senior, Wiland beat Minnesota, the following year's College World Series champion, 2-1, throwing 78 pitches in one hour and 28 minutes.
Wiland still holds two University of Iowa records, least bases on balls in a season (6) and lowest ERA (0.43 as a reliever during his junior season of 1962).
Wiland spent the 1964 baseball season as a graduate assistant at Iowa. Returning to California, he was a Palomar football assistant coach and was Bob Vetter's pitching coach for the Comets in baseball from 1987 through 1990. He coached Mark Ringkamp, who won 23 games in 1988-89, the best career mark in Palomar history (Nick Vincent is second on the all-time list with 20 wins).
Ringkamp, who went on to pitch for San Jose State and in the Texas Rangers organization, was drafted twice, after his freshman season at Palomar by the Seattle Mariners and out of San Jose State by the Rangers. He signed with the Rangers after his 1991 season for the Spartans, but suffered a career-ending arm injury in his second year of minor league ball, when he was 6-2 at the time at Fort Meyers, FL in Advanced Class A.
Wiland also was a minor league pitching coach in the Montreal Expos organization and was an associate scout for the Expos and later for the Colorado Rockies.
In football, he also coached at Fallbrook High School, where he spent a stint as head coach, and as an assistant at MiraCosta College before the Spartans dropped the sport. Wiland spent most of his teaching career at Fallbrook High and also was an adjunct professor at both Palomar and MiraCosta.
Wiland, who earned a Masters degree in physical education from the University of Iowa, has been married to the former Patricia Townsend for 52 years. Their son, the late Rick Wiland, played football for Palomar.
The Palomar Alumni golf tournament was a fund-raiser for the Comets' softball and women's golf teams.