Building bonds over wins has motivated this Merced County three-sport coach for 20 years

Atwater High School football coach Seneca Ybarra has recently discovered the value of a good nap.

With four kids between 10 and 16 — all of them involved with sports of their own — and Ybarra, 46, himself coaching three high school sports for the past 20 years, there isn’t much down time for the Ybarra family.

So an opportunity to take quick power naps has become essential to keeping Ybarra’s battery charged.

“This is the first summer I started taking naps,” said Ybarra, who has been the head football coach for the Falcons since 2017 and was a longtime assistant before that at Atwater, Merced and Golden Valley.

Ybarra has also spent two decades coaching boys basketball and track and field.

“I think I’m starting to feel it,” Ybarra said.

With football practices starting on July 31, it’s about as close it gets to down time for Ybarra. Football is in the middle of its dead period in the Sac-Joaquin Section, which means teams are permitted only to lift weights and do conditioning work.

“Yeah, not vacation time for me,” Ybarra said. “We’re still lifting weights, running, trying to find ways to get better.”

Ybarra says the first thing people would say about him is he’s a high-energy guy. He’s got the type of motor that never turns off during football practices and apparently never slows down during the year as he transitions from one sport to another.

“I was worse 20 years ago,” he said. “I think I’ve mellowed out. I love being at practice. Games are fun, but they’re for the kids. I love the offseason and I love practice. When I stop enjoying practice then it might be time to stop.”

Ybarra graduated in 1996 from Golden Valley High School, where he played football and basketball and competed in track and field.

He was working as a server for his uncle at Paul’s Place in Merced when one of his former football coaches, Kevin Swartwood, came in to the restaurant with his family.

“I knew him as a player; he was a defensive back for us,” said Swartwood, who is now the principal at Golden Valley. “He always had a lot of passion for the game. He always had a lot of energy. So I asked him to come coach, and he did. I was coaching freshmen at the time, and he came with me.”

“When I asked him to come coach I didn’t think he would,” Swartwood added. “Not only did he do it, he made it a lifelong career.”

Looking around Merced County, there’s not a long list of active head football coaches who have been at it for 20 or more years outside of Merced’s Rob Scheidt, Golden Valley’s Rick Martinez, Hilmar’s Frank Marques and Los Banos’ Dustin Caropreso.

“It’s rare to have a head coach in any sport that long, and it’s extremely rare to have a head football coach who coaches another sport for a few years,” Swartwood said. “For him to do it for 20 years, there’s that passion and energy.”

“I remember when I was coaching football, every year when it got to late November or early December, and we’re getting all our stuff collected, I remember every year thinking, ‘I’m tired,’” Swartwood added. “And I wasn’t old, but I was tired. It’s a grind. I can’t imagine just rolling over to basketball.”

Ybarra is one of a handful who coach three sports in the Merced Union High School district and is the only head football coach to do it. He does it while overseeing about 70 football athletes during offseason workouts each year.

“It’s not easy,” Ybarra said. “It’s getting tougher: The kids are tougher; the parents are a little tougher. I do hear things from the stands. Not everyone is going to be happy with you. The real ones know you’re spending extra time, your free time with the kids. I enjoy the fruits of the labor and seeing young men and ladies flourish.”

What Ybarra loves about coaching isn’t the thrill of big victories or chasing league championships. He enjoys building the bond with kids.

He takes pride in seeing kids grow up to be good fathers, uncles and brothers. He wants them to become productive members of the community.

“I want that to be my legacy,” Ybarra said.

Ybarra said many of the mentors in his life were the coaches he played for such as former Golden Valley coaches like Swartwood, Keith Hunter (basketball) and Bill Hurst (track).

“A lot of kids come from impoverished backgrounds in this area,” Ybarra said. “They don’t have two parents. Those guys filled that gap for me because I came from a single-parent home.”

Ybarra isn’t just a mentor for his players, he’s helped younger coaches as well. Ybarra says he learned a lot coaching football under longtime coaches like Scheidt and Dennis Stubbs at Golden Valley.

Ybarra was the defensive back coach at Merced when the Bears made a run to the section championship game against Vacaville High School in 2006.

Atwater boys basketball coach Kanoa Smith remembers coaching junior varsity basketball with Ybarra in 2011. Smith was 22 at the time and in his fifth year of coaching.

It was the first day of tryouts, and Smith was shooting on one of the side hoops as the players were running sprints.

Ybarra asked him why he was out there. Did he want to be an assistant? Did he want to be a lower level head coach? What was his goal?

“I told him I wanted to be a head coach and run a program,” Smith said. “He basically said, ‘OK, well then let’s do it,’ in a way that was meant to reassure me that I could, but also stern enough to be like stop shooting on these damn side hoops.”

Smith says that team finished around .500 because Ybarra was able to grab four football players to join the team to ensure enough players for practice. Right away, Smith saw the benefits of Ybarra coaching multiple sports.

“For me, that was the first time somebody in a position of authority on the staff didn’t treat me like a young goofball,” Smith said. “Granted a lot of that was my own doing, because I messed around a lot as a player... I was going into my fifth year (of coaching) and I was never really put in charge of anything.”

“He would get on me for not having a voice and would often put me in charge of something different every day at practice or a game,” Smith added. “I learned more that one year than I did in the previous four years combined.”

Smith has led the Falcons basketball program to Central California Conference championships the past two years and a 29-1 record this past season.

“Being an older guy, I enjoyed every single moment of that season,” Ybarra said. “Because I’ve been doing it so long I know things like that don’t happen very often.”

Ybarra stepped away from coaching basketball a couple years after being promoted to head football coach at Atwater. If was his wife, Rami, who convinced him to get back in the gym.

“I think I was watching too much basketball on TV when I was home,” Ybarra said. “She asked me what kind of program do you want to have when our kids come through high school?”

Now with two of his kids attending Atwater High School, Ybarra doesn’t see an end to his coaching career coming anytime soon.

His oldest son, Seneca Ybarra II, will be a junior receiver and defensive back for the Falcons this season and finished as the top sophomore hurdler in the Sac-Joaquin Section last spring.

“People say Michael Jordan had an addiction to that competitive spirit,” Ybarra said. “I think there is such a thing. I love to compete, I love to coach, I love to give back. I had great mentors growing up. I have knowledge and I want to pass that on.”