| Bill Arce | |
|---|---|
| Born:June 24, 1925 Oakland, California | |
| Died: March 7, 2016 (aged 90) Pomona, California | |
| Member of the Netherlands | |
 Baseball Hall of Fame | |
| Induction | 1985 |
Medals | |
William Benjamin Arce Jr. was a college baseball coach. [1] [2] [3] He was founding athletic director at the Claremont Colleges in California. [4] The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Stags baseball stadium is named after him. [4]
Arce served as head coach of the baseball team from 1958 to 1979, compiling a win–loss record of 446–354–16 (.556) and leading the Stags to Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championships in 1970, 1971, and 1975. [4] He was named as one of the five finalists in the baseball coach of the year award by the American Association of College Baseball Coaches in 1975 and [5] was inducted into the NAIA Hall of Fame 1976. [6] He won the American Baseball Coaches Association's Lefty Gomez Award in 2001. [7] [4]
After retiring in 1983, [4] Arce spent his summers and sabbatical leaves developing baseball internationally. He was the first American baseball coach to provide baseball instruction in Belgium (1962), Sweden (1962), Czechoslovakia (1969), Yugoslavia (1979), [8] and China (1980). [9] In 1985, he founded International Sports Group, a non-profit organization that conducts international coaching clinics. [4]
Arce led a team with many Claremont players, the California Stags, to play in the Haarlem Baseball Week tournament, winning it in 1966 [10] He was named the best coach of the tournament in 1963 and 1971. [11] Arce coached future Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy on the California Stags. [12] Arce also managed the national teams of both the Netherlands (1971) and Italy (1975) to the European Baseball Championship. [8] Arce was also on the coaching staff for the U.S. national collegiate team in 1970 [13] and for USA Baseball in 1976 and 1978. He later coached France in the 2003 European championship. [11] Arce was inducted into the Netherlands Baseball Hall of Fame in 1985. [14]
