GOODBYE, COACH B

PALMER — What would Coach B do?

It’s a simple question, one hundreds of Valley high school athletes have asked themselves many times over.

“When in doubt, just ask yourself this question,” said Dawn Brettrager, longtime Colony High School swim coach. “If Coach B wouldn’t do it, it’s wrong.”

After 30 years behind the whistle, Brettrager is nearing the end of a Valley coaching career that spans four different decades and includes some of the most memorable moments in local sports history. Coach B, as she’s called by her students and athletes — even her daughters Kalli and Sarah say she answers to that more than she does “hey, mom” — cultivated a love for teaching and athletics into a 29-year career teaching health and physical education. She’s coached basketball, volleyball, cheerleading and cross-country, and for the last 12 years has been the CHS swim coach.

With the Region III swim meet set for this weekend, a coaching run that reaches back to 1982 and includes stints at Wasilla, Palmer and Colony high schools is nearing an end. After the state swim meet, Coach B is retiring.

“This is it,” she said when asked if the lure of coaching could call her into action again. “I’ve enjoyed all the years I’ve coached and there’s been lots of highlights, there’s been some lowlights. There have been some difficult years with kids’ behavior and that kind of stuff, but overall, I really enjoyed it.”

Coaching comes naturally to the tall woman who played guard for Michigan State University. In fact, her athletic ability hasn’t waned much. She’s completed the Mount Marathon run seven times and still can school the youngsters on the basketball court.

Having coached so many different sports over the course of her career, Brettrager said she learned a valuable lesson that was told to her before she took over the Colony swimming program.

“My daughter was in high school and on the swim team there,” she said. “At the end of her freshman year, the athletic director, Mike Boyd, said, ‘We’re going to have you coach next year.’ Well, I don’t know anything about swimming.

“That’s when the former coach said that it’s 80 percent coaching, and you have the coaching down. Then it’s 20 percent swimming, and I’ll help you with the swimming part. That’s when I thought maybe I can do this.”

Ask what sport she enjoyed coaching the most, Brettrager said it’s hard to choose. She loves the game of basketball, but also enjoyed coaching her daughters on the swim team.

“I love basketball and I’ve really, really enjoyed coaching swimming,” she said. “I think one of the big differences I figured out right away is that, yes, (swimming) is a team sport, but you don’t have to complete with anybody else. You’re swimming in your own lane by yourself. It’s you and the clock, and every kid can see improvement every meet.”

Asked about any particularly memorable moments coaching in the Valley, Coach B cracks a big smile. This is an easy question. It was 1986 when Palmer won the girls’ state basketball championship. They beat a North Pole team that featured a talented sophomore guard who would go on to become, at the time, the most decorated girls’ hoops player in state history — Jeannie Hebert. Hebert, now Jeannie Hebert-Truax and head coach of the Wasilla girls program, played her final two years at Monroe Catholic in Fairbanks and led the Rams to a pair of state titles. She played Division I ball at the University of Miami and is in the UM Sports Hall of Fame.

But in 1986, Palmer beat Hebert’s team.

“From coaching, overall I would say winning that state championship in basketball when I was at Palmer is most memorable,” Coach B said. “The team we were playing against in the championship was Jeannie Hebert’s team. She had an opportunity to win the game at the free throw line, and she missed it and we won.”

Even then, though, Brettrager said she knew that wouldn’t be the last anyone heard of Hebert.

“She definitely had a lot of talent and I knew she’d be successful in college,” Brettrager said, adding she later hired Hebert as an assistant when she was coaching Wasilla. “It came full circle. I thought, ‘oh, Jeannie’s here, I can step down.’ That was the last I coached basketball. But still, every once in awhile I’ll tell some of her players how she missed those free throws.”

Now in her 17th year as the Wasilla girls coach, Hebert-Truax confirmed the missed free throws do come up from time to time.

“She would never bring those up in front of me,” she said with a laugh. “Of course, one of the things it did for me was make me a better free throw shooter.”

Coaching the C team under Brettrager was Hebert-Truax’s first coaching job, and she has a lot of respect for anyone who can coach at a high level for so long.

“For someone to be in the coaching aspect for 30 years, that’s just amazing,” she said. “That’s awesome to have that dedication. It takes a lot of time and dedication. It takes a lot of time and dedication to coach high school sports.”

Also memorable for Brettrager was the talented Colony swim team she coached in 2003, 2004 and 2005.

“That’s when us and Soldotna were at the top of the region and neck-and-neck every meet,” she said. “The house came down because there was such an intense competition and we took some region records. And Sarah, my daughter, was on the team then. It was just a good bunch of kids with a lot of good swims in good meets.”

As athletic director at Colony, Boyd said he’ll be sorry to see Brettrager go, but praised her coaching ability.

“She’s a rare one,” he said. “She does it for all the right reasons. She believes in discipline, good nutrition, she believes in keeping the body at its peak. But she also cares enough about kids, so it’s not all about winning and losing, it’s about developing athletes, and that’s rare.”

Coach B is also a teacher of athletics. “She has kids who come to that pool who can keep their heads above water, but don’t know anything about a swim stroke and she can develop those kids into athletes.”

As for dealing with parents, Brettrager said most are great and it’s only a few who can be difficult.

“I have to say that’s one of the reasons I did step down from basketball,” she said. “Just some of the politics, I don’t enjoy that part of coaching. It’s the bad apples that spoil the whole bunch and it does come with the territory. I think sometimes parents can get sucked in a little bit.”

Swimming’s different, she said, because the time clock doesn’t lie, so it’s hard for parents to argue one athlete should be put ahead of another if the times don’t show that.

But there’s one parent moment she recalls as especially gratifying.

“There was this one particular kid I had some problems with and I was ready to kick him off the team,” she said. “There was this one road trip and I just about strangled him, had to grab him by the nape of his neck and tell him that no means no. I thought afterward that I probably shouldn’t have done that, but he shaped up after that. About six months after the season I ran into his dad one day and he said, ‘Hey, by the way, I don’t know what you did to my kid, but thank you.’”

So now that her 30-year coaching career is nearly over, what will Coach B do?

“Anything I want.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.