Once, it would have taken her two days to get over a loss.
Now, she has no time for that, as her 2-year-old daughter comes running up the hallway, squealing “mommy, mommy.”
Carmen Dolfo can’t help but grin. “Hi sweetie,” she says, sweeping little Aspen off her feet.
Julie Busch / The Herald
Twenty-five minutes earlier, Dolfo raised her arms in what seemed like a mock salute to the referees who finally made a call she liked. Now those same arms are wrapped around her daughter in a warm embrace.
Giggles trump basketball. Hugs and kisses wipe out the sting of defeat.
The metamorphosis is complete.
One minute, Dolfo’s riding the refs. The next, she’s riding the high of motherhood.
Real life comes to the gym.
It came walking into Sam Carver Gymnasium on the campus of Western Washington University 10 minutes before game time one night last week.
John Garrison always tries to arrive just before tipoff so the kids aren’t worn out midway through the first half. His right arm was looped through the handle of a bassinet in which his 7-month-old son, John Grey, lay. Behind him came his daughters, 4-year-old Kennedy and her younger sister Aspen, all decked out in shoes with blinking lights.
Garrison and his brood ambled down to the other end of the balcony, taking seats several rows up in a section not heavily crowded so the girls could romp around without bothering anyone. They’d be looking directly down on the WWU bench where wife and mother Carmen would be working for the next two hours as the head coach of the Vikings.
Dolfo was dressed all in white – slacks, blouse and a three-quarter length sweater, which she would shed less than a minute into the game.
She’s an animated figure on the sideline, often on her feet to direct her players or to help the referees call the game. A “fireball” is how one of her players described her.
She was matched against an old friend on this night, Gordy Presnell of Seattle Pacific University.
Both are among the top coaches in NCAA Division II. In his 18th year at SPU, Presnell has a record of 383-125, while Dolfo is 294-107 in her 14th season at WWU.
Dolfo’s team had come into the game with a 15-game winning streak after a season-opening loss to Montana State-Billings. SPU would snap that streak, winning 65-58 to ruin Dolfo’s 400th career game.
The 39-year-old native of Penticton, British Columbia, doesn’t take defeat easily. “No, I’m not a very good loser,” she had said earlier in the week, as she sat in her office one day after practice. “Ask my husband.”
“Before I was dating her, she said she would lie around in bed for two days after a loss,” Garrison affirmed.
“It was silly,” Dolfo added.
Perhaps. But you have to consider one thing. Women’s basketball at Western has a rich tradition, begun by Lynda Goodrich, now the athletic director, who had a 19-year record of 411-125. When Dolfo moved up from assistant coach to replace Goodrich in 1991, she was determined to keep the tradition going, and she has, putting together 11 seasons of 20 victories or more, including a berth in the NCAA Division II Final Four in 1999-2000.
Like most coaches, Dolfo puts immense pressure on herself. “I think we should win every game,” she said, without a trace of humor.
Which doesn’t sound at all unusual when you consider her background. She comes from a family in which both of her parents were coaches. “She was always competitive, from the time she was little,” said her mother, Norma, who was at the SPU game to help babysit her grandchildren. “She loved all sports. She’d never say die.”
Dolfo did say “enough,” though, when she got pregnant late in 2003 and decided to take the year off. “I just felt tired,” she said. “I felt I couldn’t put everything into it (coaching), being pregnant and having two kids at home.”
She turned the reins over to her assistant, Sara Nichols, and the Vikings did what they have always done – win, compiling a 21-8 record.
Dolfo came back refreshed this year. “I’m enjoying basketball more,” she said. “I have a really neat team, they have good chemistry, and they’re fun to work with.”
The time off and the birth of her third child, John Grey, have given Dolfo new perspective. “She’s much more pleasant than she was before,” said Herald writer Mike Allende, who covered Dolfo at the start of the season for the Bellingham Herald. “She wasn’t fun before. You knew if they lost, she was going to be less fun.”
Dolfo said it was simply a matter of maturing. “Your perspective definitely changes when you have kids,” she said.
Now she can walk out of the locker room after a loss and have a daughter come running into her arms. Or a son beam a smile at her from his bassinet.
Get the family together in Dolfo’s office and it’s like a three-ring circus. One minute, mother is down on the floor, changing her son’s diaper (“Sorry for the smell,” she says). Minutes later, John Grey is standing in the palm of his father’s hand, showing the athletic genes that have been handed down to him. A kid’s show is on the video machine while one sister twirls the other one in a chair. Garrison whispers to the girls, “Let’s see how long we can go without talking.” Which lasts about 10 seconds. “You lose,” he says to Aspen.
Garrison comes off as a big, easy teddy bear kind of guy. “He’s very patient where I’d go nuts,” Dolfo said. “He definitely is the calm one in the family. He loves being a dad.”
Western sports information director Paul Madison calls Garrison the perfect match for Dolfo. “They’re both very family oriented,” Madison said.
A former high school and college athlete, Garrison also acts as a sounding board for his wife. “Oh, yes,” Dolfo said, with a slight trace of sarcasm. “Sometimes I have to tell him – stop!”
On this night, Garrison got the kids ready for the game. Often he’ll fix the girls’ hair. “Never to Carmen’s satisfaction,” he said. “Tonight, Carmen’s mom did it. I don’t have much hair of my own to practice on.”
Like his wife, Garrison was a multi-sport athlete in high school, participating in football, basketball and track at Cascade in Everett. Later, he was an “on-and-off” starter in basketball at Eastern Washington University.
He met his future wife through his sister, Chris, who played for Western then became an assistant coach under Dolfo.
The couple lived in the Silver Lake area in south Everett for five years, with Dolfo making the 65-minute commute to Bellingham each day. Garrison was a sales rep for a national firm and often had to fly out of Sea-Tac. “It was hard,” Dolfo said. “When you have a two-career family, you have to do things to make it work.”
Life got easier when they moved to Bellingham, Garrison taking a job with a firm in town just minutes from their home.
He doesn’t go on road trips with the team, but the kids do. The assistant coaches and the players pitch in to help the “little family on the road” get from city to city. “It’s ‘who’s got the diaper bag?’” Dolfo said, laughing.
The kids sit in on the postgame locker room sessions, sometimes forgetting that they’re not supposed to provide input. “I’m lucky our athletic director allows me to take them along,” Dolfo said. “Sometimes we’re gone for five days. That’s a long time to be away from your kids.”
Dolfo has more than just her three little ones to care for as she is also very involved with the lives of her players.
“I love the competitiveness of basketball,” she said, “but the most important thing we try to do is build strong women.”
Madison has his office right next to Dolfo’s. “She’s very conscientious about having one-on-one’s with her players,” he said. “There have been years when I thought she ought to hang out a shingle.”
Junior forward Tina Donahue of Stanwood views Dolfo as a mother away from home. “If my parents are not available, she’s the person I go to,” Donahue said.
She also credits the coach for making her a better person. “She has the ability to reach inside of you and grab all that goodness out of you.”
While Dolfo may not let the losses get to her as much as they once did, she’s as passionate as ever once the game begins. “She’s the most intense coach I’ve ever known,” said Madison, who has known a good many coaches in his long career at Western. “This year it’s no different than it was in the past.”
A two-sport athlete at Western – she lettered two years in basketball, three in volleyball – Dolfo has been known to play a mean game of tennis (“tremendous hand-eye coordination,” her husband says) and, when she gets the time to practice, shoots in the low 80s on the golf course. Tall and lean, she hits the ball so far that she plays from the men’s tees.
On their honeymoon, the couple teed off in front of four elderly men who must have thought it was going to be a long afternoon. “They were not happy to see a woman in front of them and kind of rolled their eyes,” Garrison recalled. “Then she hit the ball farther than any two of them together.”
As an NAIA All-American, Dolfo averaged just under 17 points a game her senior year. And she still plays a ferocious game of 21, as Viking football coach Rob Smith found out several years ago.
Dolfo doesn’t recall how the game came about, but she does remember the outcome. So does Madison. “Rob figured he had the bulk,” Madison chuckled, “but I’ll tell you, it was no contest.”
Dolfo says she beat Smith with endurance. “He got a little tired.”
And he wasn’t a good loser.
Like someone else we know.
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