SNOHOMISH — On a September morning in 1950, a new school year began at Snohomish High School. And although no one knew it at the time, it was the start of something extraordinary because of one extraordinary man.
His name was Keith Gilbertson and he was a first-year teacher and coach. From the beginning, he loved the work and cherished the relationships. To his students and athletes, he became a mentor, a friend and a champion. He encouraged those who stumbled, urged still more from those who excelled, and conveyed to everyone that he, Keith Gilbertson, cared.
And he’s been doing it ever since.
With a new football season just weeks away, Gilbertson is about to begin his 60th year of service to the students and families of Snohomish High School, and to the community at large.
“As far as I’m concerned, he’s made a bigger impact on Snohomish High School than any other person because of the lives he’s touched through coaching and teaching,” said girls basketball coach Ken Roberts, who is assisted by Gilbertson.
“Too often we wait to honor someone until after they’ve passed away,” Roberts said. “But I think while he’s still here we have to realize what he’s done for us.”
Gilbertson, who turns 82 in August, was briefly the school’s head football coach in the 1950s, and he also coached track and cross country in the early years. But for the last several decades he has been an assistant football coach, and an assistant for boys basketball and later girls basketball.
“He is incredibly dedicated to kids,” said Ed Lucero, a Snohomish football assistant with Gilbertson for most of the past 32 years. “Who can measure the depth of his influence? He has just touched so many lives.”
Past and present, Snohomish has no shortage of sports heroes. Hundreds of ex-Panthers have gone on to play in college. A handful have played professionally. But most simply benefited from an outstanding high school experience and then went on to everyday lives, including many who chose careers in teaching and coaching, too.
“When you look at his influence, it’s not just the kids he coached,” said Ken Emmil, who played on Snohomish’s 1976 and 1978 state championship football teams under Gilbertson, an assistant. “Ultimately, how many kids have been impacted because of all the kids he coached who then went into coaching themselves? If you factor that out, imagine how many lives he’s touched in a positive way.”
In Snohomish, with its remarkably rich athletic tradition, Gilbertson has been the one constant over the years. In the early 1970s he was working with the children of former athletes. By the ’90s grandchildren were coming through the programs. And in another few years, who knows, he might coach the great-grandchild of a onetime player.
“You’re talking about generations here in this town,” said Ben Krause, a starting guard on Snohomish’s 1970 state championship basketball team, which Gilbertson helped coach.
Beyond Snohomish, the Gilbertson name is usually identified with his son, Keith Gilbertson Jr., a longtime college head football coach and assistant coach, and until recently a Seattle Seahawks assistant. But in the community itself, and among the many thousands of alumni from his nearly six decades at the high school, the Gilbertson name is generally linked with the elder Keith, who is known affectionately, even lovingly, as Coach Gilb or simply Gilby.
“If you talk about baseball in Snohomish, then it’s (Hall of Famer) Earl Averill,” said Jack de Kubber, the school’s former head boys basketball coach. “But when you talk about all sports, I think Keith is Mr. Snohomish.”
Gilbertson grew up in town and graduated from the high school in 1945. After a year in the Navy, he attended the State College of Washington (now Washington State University), where he played football for one season before a head injury required him to quit.
“Being knocked out the last three years (of college), maybe I tried to get it all back through coaching,” he said. “I may still have something in my craw that I haven’t finished what I was meant to do.”
So he ended up back in Snohomish with his wife Eileen and a young son — Keith Jr. was born in 1948 — and he learned in the early years from mentor coaches Stan Bates and Hal Moe. Later, he became the right-hand man to longtime head football coach Dick Armstrong and to de Kubber in boys basketball, and he helped guide those teams to state prominence.
Gilbertson left teaching in 1981, and for a time it looked like he might have to give up coaching, too. He had a series of medical problems that culminated with a stroke in early 1982, but he returned to finish the boys basketball season.
And he’s never stopped coming back.
His longevity in coaching is remarkable in itself, but there’s more to the story. Because although working with kids was never just a job to him, for the last 28 years it hasn’t been a job at all. Jobs are where people go to earn a paycheck. But since retiring from the classroom, Gilbertson has volunteered every hour he has coached.
A few years ago, Roberts calculated the value of all Gilbertson’s donated time. The figure was about $250,000, “and today it’s probably closer to $300,000,” Roberts said. It is, he added, “quite a gift to Snohomish High School.”
Asked why he declines a salary, Gilbertson shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “I wouldn’t want to put (money) out front as the reason I’m there. I’m going to survive, so I don’t need that.”
In 1995, after 45 years of coaching, Gilbertson tried something different. He began coaching girls.
“It’s been a marvelous experience,” he said. “We’ve had some ups and downs parentally, but not to the same degree we were getting with the boys. And this last year was the grandest bunch of girls you’d ever want.”
Shortly after Gilbertson started coaching girls basketball, a player named Mary Etter asked how come he never hollered at the team.
“She said, ‘I used to hear you yelling at the boys all the time.’ And I said, ‘Mary, you don’t need it. You guys are motivated. You’re hanging on everything we say and you’re trying to do everything we ask you to do. Now why would I raise my voice?’ And I think she understood.”
Those who knew Gilbertson in his younger years say he could indeed turn up the decibels. And if a discreet scolding was necessary, he could do that, too.
Krause remembers the time he talked back to de Kubber in a timeout huddle and was immediately confronted by Gilbertson.
“He took me off to the side and he gave it to me,” Krause said. “He said, ‘You show respect. You don’t do that.’ And it was the last time I ever did. … Coach Gilb was always there to egg you on or to humble you, one of the two. And he put me in my place a couple of times.”
“He was hard-nosed with kids, but not rough,” de Kubber said. “He never cussed, but he got the word across. And I don’t think it’s changed. He’s very quiet until he has something to say.”
He has, most would agree, mellowed in recent years. Still, every so often something lights his fuse and the old Gilby shows up.
This past basketball season, Roberts said, “there was a game when he got fired up at the refs. It was really something to see a guy his age who’s still so competitive. Seeing the fire that he still has for the kids and for the team.”
Now, you might think an aging coach would be the target of bemusement and even behind-the-back scorn from a group of cocksure teen-agers. But it says something about the young people of Snohomish, not to mention Gilbertson’s own stature, that he is still admired, still respected, still obeyed.
“When he talks, the kids listen,” Lucero said. “You can see it in their eyes. They don’t pass him off as this old guy that’s hanging around. When he’s coaching, they’re onto him. … He’s not just a hood ornament. He has things to contribute to the program, and he definitely commands a respect from the people involved.”
Roberts recalls the time a young basketball player was talking while Gilbertson was addressing the team, “and one of the seniors absolutely tore into her. She said, ‘You respect (Gilbertson) and do the right thing.’ … If kids come in with a (dismissive) attitude, they learn very quickly how they’re supposed to act and the respect they should have for him.”
For all the hours Gilbertson gives to coaching, he contributes in other ways, too. Every month, for example, he sends out dozens of hand-written letters to former students and athletes. He ends up writing some 500 letters a year, maybe more, and his thoughtful missives convey that he, Keith Gilbertson, still cares.
Emmil started getting weekly letters when he went away to college, “and they were very personal. He’d let you know how things were going, and he made you feel like you were still back (in Snohomish) and that you were still part of (the program). … I used to think I was the only one getting them, but later on I went to a reunion and it was like, ‘Oh, you get them, too?’”
Basketball player Daesha Henderson, who graduated in 2006 and now plays at Seattle Pacific University, said she receives “about five letters a year (from Gilbertson). Definitely on holidays and on my birthday, and then sporadic ones to update me on the basketball season and just to say, ‘How are you?’
“He has,” she went on, “an amazing heart. Everyone who comes into his life, he just touches them in a personal way.”
For all the joys in Gilbertson’s lifetime, there has been sadness, too. Foremost, the death of Eileen, his wife of nearly 50 years, in 1995. He returned to coaching weeks later, but her passing led him to evaluate and amend his own life.
“I decided I was going to be a surrogate for her,” he said, his eyes tearing, “so I took up all the things I didn’t have time for before. Now I go to Bible study and prayer group every week. And I have a great more understanding of myself than I did at one time because … I take the time for those things now.”
As the years pass, more and more young people are blessed by the acquaintance of this extraordinary man. And if Gilbertson has his way, those blessings will continue for years to come.
“In my own mind,” he said, “I’ve never had enough athletics to say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ I don’t know what it is, but there’s something deep inside that drives me. Maybe it’s the competition. Maybe it’s the camaraderie with the kids and the coaches. But it’s what I do. And it’s good for me. It gives me something worthwhile to do and to contribute.
“I’ll know when it’s time to leave. And if my friends in the coaching fraternity suggest that it’s time, I’ll probably take their advice and go. Because I won’t ever do anything to embarrass the school. And if I come to the point where I think I might, I’ll get out myself.”
Until then, he expects to stay on “until I can’t walk up the steps in the stadium any longer.” Of course, he added with a twinkle, “I had hopes they’d put an escalator in there.”
His journey in coaching has been long and fruitful, but at some point there must be a final season, a final game, a final farewell banquet. Eventually there will be kids at Snohomish High School who know Gilbertson only by his picture and reputation, and not by the warmth of his presence.
But in the meantime, “what a phenomenal legacy he’s building,” Emmil said. “And I say building because who knows how long he’ll keep coaching. He just keeps plugging away.”
“He is just an absolutely unbelievable guy,” Henderson said. “I’ve met no one like him. Honestly, he is one of a kind.”
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