“He loved going to every single practice, because it’s Kobe Bryant. So you’re seeing that guy coach. And he’s seeing him coach his daughter in a sport that she loved to play. He didn't miss many practices and he loved going out and Kobe would talk to him and stuff,” Nate Johnson, the assistant baseball coach at Orange Coast, told The Daily Beast.
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“He put it in baseball terms,” Johnson added. “He was like, ‘What if Derek Jeter was teaching your son how to play baseball? Are you going to miss his practices or are you going to be at every single one?’
“He and Kobe had a special thing just because they did coach and play and understood sports and I think Kobe saw that in Alto and that's why that relationship was able to kind of take off.”
Before the Orange Coast baseball team went to the state final four in 2018, Altobelli invited Kobe to give the team a surprise pep talk.
“He had all the guys sit in the third base dugout which you're able to drive behind that one. And Kobe parked his blacked-out Range Rover back there and he was able to walk out without anyone seeing him. The guys were floored and super excited,” Johnson said.
Jason Kehler, the Orange Coast athletic director, told The Daily Beast that John Altobelli was “an amazing coach” who “personified everything that you would want from a baseball coach, and a co-worker in general.”
His teams won four state championship in the last 10 seasons and many more conference championships, and he was just named the American Baseball Coaches Association Coach of the Year.
Leonard Ortiz/The Orange County Register via AP
After news of the coach’s death broke, the school opened up the field so team members and alumni could be together.
Kehler said Altobelli’s brother Tony, who is the college’s sports information director, addressed the group.
“He echoed what one of the assistant coaches said, that John was really excited about this team and that it was going to be really tough but we were going to take it day by day,” he said. “And that was how we were going to get through this.”
Was trying to find info on the Altobelli's, was wondering if they had any other siblings, at least another brother in the family.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kobe-bryant-crash-devastates-families-of-other-victims-john-altobelli-and-christine-mauser