By Don Ketchum

Eleven-year-old Dan Mannix was devastated when his favorite baseball team, the Dodgers, left his native Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1957.

He used to ride the trolley along Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue to Empire Boulevard, where he would attend games at Ebbetts Field. A friend of his father worked at the ballpark and sometimes would let him in for free. He loved Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Sandy Koufax and Duke Snider. He played Little League ball with one of Gil Hodges’ sons.

“But I hated the team after it left,’’ he said.

He later developed an allegiance to the expansion Mets, but it wasn’t nearly the same. He rooted for “whoever was playing the Yankees,’’ a notion to which he still holds today.

Little did Mannix know at the time was that when he got older, he, too, would move West. Not as far as Los Angeles, but pretty close, to Phoenix. He still loved baseball, especially in the land of spring training. By the mid 1970s, however, he loved basketball as much, if not more so.

Mannix became a teacher and boys’ basketball coach at Sunnyslope High in Phoenix. For 33 years, he was the school’s varsity coach, winning two state championships and earning two runners-up trophies, before stepping down in May.

He coached seven first-team All-State players, including Royce Woolridge, The Arizona Republic’s Big School Player of the Year as a junior in 2009. Woolridge is now a freshman at Kansas.

Mannix, 63, will teach one physical education class and be an assistant coach for new coach Ray Portela, a former assistant coach who played for Mannix at Sunnyslope and graduated in 1995 along with Mannix’s son, Michael.

Portela was a “two’ guard, Mannix said, played the point on occasion “and was a great defender,’’ Mannix said. “He also was a terrific rebounder for his size and was a good slasher to the basket. He was one of our great competitors, and he will be the same way as a coach. The program is in good hands.’’

For the first part of the season, Mannix expects to do a lot of advance scouting of opponents, and on occasion will join Portela on the bench later in the season.

“Working with the kids all these years has kept me young,’’ Mannix said. “I love it when the kids want to be coached, when they realize they don’t have all the answers.

“I hope I have been an influence on them, just as they have been an influence on me. The things I have witnessed on and off the court, their kindness and concern for each other, I will always remember.

“We have always tried to talk about communication, trust, individual and collective responsibility, to care and have pride.’’

He always has been thankful to be a coach.

“I respect the coaches, because they have made a difference in my life, particularly early on in Brooklyn. They helped me keep my head on straight when I could have gone in a different direction.’’

Mannix went to college and played basketball at a small college in Santa Fe, N.M. He met his future wife, Geri, there. He came over to Phoenix one spring with some buddies to attend spring training games. He saw the San Francisco Giants’ Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal lounging by a hotel pool.

He also was walking through another hotel lobby when he bumped into a man who was buying cigarettes out of a machine.

“He said, “Sorry, kid,’ ’’ Mannix said. “It was Joe Dimaggio, who was working for the Oakland A’s at the time. It was amazing.’’

His brushes with greatness didn’t stop there.

He was working as a teacher in New York City when a budget crisis forced layoffs of 10,000 of the school district’s 60,000 employees. Mannix drove a beer truck in Spanish Harlem, and later went for a job interview in Albuquerque. That didn’t work out, but before he returned to New York, his Aunt Anna suggested that he call a man she knew in Phoenix who might give him a job.

“I wanted to give it a try because I had fallen in love with the place when I was out here before,’’ Mannix said.

“The guy wanted me to take orders for key rings, change purses, stuff like that, and he said I could teach on the side if I wanted,’’ Mannix said. “One day I was in the office, talking to this one guy for about an hour and a half. He was very nice, smoked a pipe. It was Jesse Owens (Olympic legend).

“I called Geri and I said, ‘We’re moving.’ I later got a job teaching driver’s ed (education) and Pete Altieri, then the athletic director in the Glendale District (high school), got me a job at Sunnyslope. So that’s where I stayed.

“It has gone by amazingly fast. We have four children and six grandchildren. I have been very fortunate to be able to coach and do what I have done.’’