The Darrington High School boys baseball team had lost to a team it should have beaten, and so when the Logger players showed up for practice the next day, the coach told them to leave their gloves in the locker room, “you won’t be needing them.”
“We ran for an hour,” remembers Kevin Tollenaa
r. “If you got on the bad side of her, you paid the price.”
Her?
That’s right.
The coach was a woman.
And that coach, Nancy Snyder, did what no-one else has ever done at Darrington High School: She won a state championship in baseball.
The Loggers reigned su
preme in the 2B state tournament in 1981, outscoring their three opponents 10-3, including a 6-1 victory over Ritzville in the title game that gave them an 18-0 record.
On the 30th anniversary of that achievement, some of the players from that Loggers team reflected on the season that put th
em in the history books, not only because they won a state title, but because they did it with a woman coaching them.
Snyder might be the only woman ever to direct a boys baseball team to a state title … in the entire country. An official with the National Federation of State High Schools A
ssociation, John Gillis, said the NFHS doesn’t track that sort of data, but that he “couldn’t recall that ever happening.”
A man who has been writing about prep sports on a national level for nearly 50 years, Dave Krider, said he “couldn’t think of anybody who would be in that category.”
So, until we learn otherwise, it’s a category of one.
One very good coach. Who knew how the game should be played, who stressed fundamentals, who could be tough when toughness was called for.
Dissatisifed with the Loggers’ unenergetic warmups before a game at Orcas Island one day, Snyder gathered her players in the outfield and let them know how she felt. It wasn’t a sit-around-the-campfire-feel-good moment.
In the dugout during the game, with the Loggers trailing, players said the general feeling was, “If we lose to Orcas, we’re gonna die tomorrow in practice,” Jeff Bryson recalled.
He could laugh about it now. But that day, “there was an element of fear.”
In the end, the Loggers prevailed, pulling a victory “out of the hole.”
“We respected her because she was tough and she knew the game,” said Bryson, now a teacher and varsity assistant boys basketball coach at Arlington High School. “She was well known as a high level athlete.”
Indeed, Snyder played four years for a semi-pro softball team in Portland, earning All-American honors as a pitcher. The team played 90 to 100 games each summer, traveling to Utah, Montana and Arizona. Twice the team placed third in the nationals.
Snyder loved playing. Loved studying the game. “I was like a sponge,” she said, “and I had some excellent coaches.”
She would bring that knowledge to her first teaching/coaching job after graduating from Eastern Washington University. Not only first, but last. She would spend her entire career — 30 years — at Darrington.
Hardly what she expected after her job interview. The man who interviewed her, principal Beryl Mauldin, “had a crewcut and never smiled.”
“I wasn’t going to go there,” Snyder remembers thinking.
She did, of course. And never regretted it for a moment.
“Nothing could have been more perfect,” she said. “The community, the staff, the kids.”
Oh, and that principal? “The most unbelievable mentor I’ve ever seen.”
And, to this day, a close friend.
It was Mauldin who put her in charge of the baseball team, a job she would have for 20 years.
This was revolutionary. A woman coaching a boys baseball team? In 1973?
“The neat thing about Mauldin,” Snyder said, “was he treated all sports and all genders equally. He was way ahead of Title Nine.”
Mauldin was aware of Snyder’s athletic achievements when he hired her as a volleyball and girls basketball coach. Then, when he needed a baseball coach, he reasoned that the only difference between baseball and softball was the way the ball was pitched.
“You field the same way, you bat the same way,” he mused.
It wasn’t just her athletic background that made Snyder, a 1963 graduate of Cascade High in Everett, a good coach. “She knew kids, really understood them,” Mauldin said. “Whether they admit it or not, kids like organization and discipline, and she had both of them.”
Somewhere out there are some kids who learned discipline the hard way from Snyder. One day she was teaching a physical education class and a couple of kids threw rocks at one another. Snyder walked into the Mauldin’s office and said, “I want those kids paddled.”
Well, Mauldin didn’t believe in using the paddle. But Snyder did. And she carried out the punishment.
She could punish with her tongue, too. “She was not afraid to let you know if you weren’t living up to her standards,” said Doug Lenker, who was the standout pitcher on the state championship team. “She was a good fundamental coach who made you do what you needed to do.”
Snyder didn’t spare the verbal rod when it came to umpires, either. “She was tough on umpires,” Bryson, the shortstop, said. “She knew the rules, inside out.”
When she talks about the ’81 title team, you can tell she still has deep feelings for the players. “The neat thing about my guys,” she said, “is they were all gentlemen.”
And they treated her as an equal, not as a woman coach, but simply as “just another coach,” the first baseman Tollenaar said.
That coach had a huge impact on the success of the ’81 team. “We were not an over-talented team,” Lenker said. “On paper, we should not have been in the state tournament. Size us up, man for man and people would have said, ‘no way.’ But we had good pitching, we were able to create runs, and the fundamentals got us through.”
Snyder’s philosophy as a coach was, “I didn’t take them to state. I gave them every opportunity to take me to state. I never felt like it was my state tournament. I got to go along for the ride.”
So often you hear kids say “we want to go to state.” That wasn’t the ultimate goal of the Loggers of ’81. “They came in with the intentions of winning state,” Snyder said. “They really believed they could accomplish it.
“We had good leadership. Doug Lenker was a tremendous leader. He wouldn’t let anybody slack off. He was a hard worker, too. If he wasn’t playing baseball, he was helping his family or off in the woods, digging fire trails.”
Today, Lenker still works in the woods as a tree cutter. And, he’s on the school board. “He’s my boss,” said Snyder, who still does some substitute teaching at the high school, as well as serving as an assistant coach for the girls softball team.
Snyder didn’t have an assistant coach in baseball. Which was fine with her. “I needed to develop this (program) on my own,” she said.
One of the individual highlights in ’81 was a near perfect game by Lenker. The only blemish on his performance was a single walk. Of the 15 outs recorded in a game that was stopped after five innings by the 10-run rule, Lenker accounted for 14 of them on strikeouts. The only other out was a routine infield foul ball that Lenker caught, with his teammates yelling for him not to catch it so he could get another strikeout.
“We still laugh about that,” Snyder said.
Lenker and everyone else on the Darrington team had a little extra motivation in that game. It seems when the Loggers got off the bus and walked across the infield to their dugout, some of the players on the opposing team joked that they “looked like the Bad News Bears.” And, Snyder ruefully recalled, “they said we even had a woman coach.”
She didn’t have to manufacture a pep talk.
Final score, 10-0.
Thirty years later, Snyder is still doing what she loves. Teaching and coaching, only on a part-time basis. “I love being an assistant coach,” she said. “I don’t have to do anything but teach girls. They’re like sponges.”
One of her former players, Susan Howard, is the head coach. The two share a house in Arlington, where they have a large shop in the backyard and firewood stacked neatly along a fence on one side. Twelve cords which they cut and stacked with the help of Snyder’s brother.
“I’m forever packing wood around,” said Snyder, who will be 66 this summer and looks like she could still throw a mean softball.
Her passions since retiring from full-time teaching in 2003? She took up golf, fishing and wood carving.
Her shop is festooned with ribbons she’s won for her wood creations. As with anything she attempts, she strives to excel, and is really into the wood carving, spending 12 to 16 hours a week in the shop.
On one piece of wood, she had carved out a picture of an old barn, which, you figured, must have taken her several days. About a half hour, she said.
She considers herself at the “intermediate” level of wood carvers. “There are so many people so far ahead of me,” she said. “If I work every day, I could move up, but I just don’t have the time.”
Some of her creations she sells, many of them she gives away. She and Howard also have a lawn mowing business, though they don’t ask to be paid. “Whatever they want to give us,” Snyder said.
And if Arlington gets a heavy snow, neighbors know where to come to get their driveways cleared out. Snyder and Howard have a snow blower.
As if all this is not enough to keep her busy, Snyder is also engaged in establishing a sports and academic Hall of Fame at Darrington High School.
Why is she still so very much involved in Darrington? “I like the community,” she said. “Those people have been very good to me. That’s why I like going back there and doing things.”
Her old boss, Beryl Mauldin, might have summed up Snyder best when he said, “She’s a good human being.”
Amen.
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