In the process of hiring another quality teacher, Island Coast High School also found a baseball coach to guide its young program.

Clint Montgomery, who served as an ESE (Exceptional Student Education) teacher and varsity baseball coach at Lehigh, has accepted a position at Cape Coral’s newest high school, Island Coast athletic director Mike Gehlhausen confirmed Thursday.

“He’s a great classroom teacher. That’s the most important thing,” Gehlhausen said. “Principal (G. Peter) Bohatch has looked at and concentrated on hiring quality teaching, but one of the questions is do you have any experience coaching sports. That’s sort of how that happened.”

Island Coast, which has been operating in portable classrooms near High Tech North, moves into its brand-new facility for the 2008-09 school year.

So far, they’ve fielded primarily junior varsity and freshman teams, including JV baseball, but the Gators begin competing in varsity sports more regularly next year.

Montgomery, the 2008 Class 5A Coach of the Year, brings instant credibility to the Gators. He helped lead a significant turnaround at Lehigh the past two seasons.

The Lightning slipped to 4-19 and 0-8 in District 5A-15 in 2005-06, but the past two years under Montgomery they improved to 10-16 (2-5) in 2006-07 and 13-13 (6-3) this past season.

The Lightning had key regular-season victories over Mariner and Barron Collier, but lost a 1-0 heartbreaker to Gulf Coast in the district quarterfinals when they walked in the game-winning run.