ABOUT COACH
After spending 41 years coaching college baseball, retirement brought on a new set of challenges and opportunities. With five daughters now grown and gone, there would be plenty of time on Gary's hands, and so he and his wife embarked on an exciting new life – publishing books that had waited far too long to be published, and a new passion, growing high- quality Syrah grapes for wine. Currently, The Adams family is in their 11th season of producing estate syrah and malbec (added in 2014). When not producing his award winning wine, Gary enjoys playing in his senior softball league, writing books and playing with his grandson, Kameron.
As for the books, Gary now has multiple children's books available, as well as the hard cover book, "Conversations With Coach Wooden," a book that brings delightful stories and surprises to the readers about the great coach and man, John Wooden. Being a contemporary of John Wooden, Gary was also an office mate with him for over seven years, which inspired him to put his stories about John in writing. He also just published his second piece of non-fiction, "Winning With Honor," an extraordinary account surrounding both current Los Angeles Dodgers Manager, Dave Roberts, and again, the legendary John Wooden. This book details how the two managers learned how to win the "right" way.
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Adams served as the head baseball coach at UCLA from 1975 to 2004 and was the Bruins' all-time winningest coach at the time of his retirement. He led the Bruins (his alma mater, 1959-1962) to 11 NCAA Regional Tournaments and one College World Series. Prior to his time at UCLA, Adams was the head coach at UC Irvine (1970-1974), where he won two NCAA Division Two championships, as well as the assistant head coach at UC Riverside (1965-1969). He has put prominent players into the big leagues such as Eric Karros, Todd Zeile, Torey Lovullo, Dave Roberts, Troy Glaus, Eric Byrnes, Tim Leary, Shane Mack, and Chase Utley, just to name a few, and at the time of his retirement (2004), had put the most players into the Bigs.