In terms of physical stature, he was not particularly imposing.
But if measured by the number of lives he touched during his long and remarkably successful coaching career, then few men stood taller than Rich Rowe.
Rowe, who guided Edmonds High School to football prominence beginning in the mid-1940s and continuing until his retirement from teaching in the spring of 1974, died Saturday at his home in Kamuela, Hawaii. He was 96.
His career roughly paralleled the years of another Snohomish County football coaching legend, Jim Ennis of Everett, and overlapped a third, Dick Armstrong of Snohomish. And very much like Ennis and Armstrong, Rowe was driven by a love of the game and by a passion to do best for his players.
To this day, many of those onetime athletes — some of them now grandfathers — recall him with words of near reverence.
“He was kind of an icon in Edmonds,” said Tim Mead, an All-Western Conference linebacker in the late 1960s and later a college player. “And he was inspirational in a ton of ways. I just can’t say enough about him. I was so blessed to be around him and to be coached by him.”
Mead is one of several Rowe protégés who went into coaching.
“And I think I did,” said Mead, the former head football coach at Mariner and Kamiak high schools, “because of him.”
Another was Fred Shull, who played for Rowe in the late 1950s and later coached with him at Edmonds in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Rowe also served as longtime baseball coach at Edmonds, and Shull succeeded him at that job in 1972.
“He was a big influence on my life as a player and then as an assistant coach, too,” Shull said. “You probably only come across two or three people in your life who have such a big influence on you, and he was sure one of them for me.”
“There was an aura about him,” said Gary Minugh, one of Shull’s Edmonds teammates in the late 1950s and later the head coach at Meadowdale in the 1990s. “He had an ability to teach and motivate, which is so important in the classroom and on the football field. Rich had both those qualities. He was just a good man.”
Minugh remembers going to watch Edmonds practices, “and being impressed by (Rowe) when I was 11 years old,” he said. “He just built a tradition that the kids bought into. When they came to Edmonds, they knew they were going to be on a good football team because he turned out a lot of good football teams.”
“I used to watch the games when I was a kid and I knew I wanted to play at Edmonds,” said Bill Demeroutis, who became an all-state center in 1967. “I wanted to be part of the winning tradition at Edmonds, and that was due to Coach Rowe. He was like a father image to a lot of us.”
“He absolutely was a father-type figure to me,” agreed Warren Lashua, who played for Rowe in the early 1950s and was an all-state running back. “He got me interested in sports, particularly football, and he changed the direction of my life.”
As a coach, Rowe “never singled anybody out,” Lashua said. “There was constructive criticism, but he never humiliated or belittled anybody, ever. And he never swore at the kids. When he got mad, he’d say, ‘You knucklehead.’ That was his favorite expression. But there was no ranting and raving or anything like that.”
One of the great things about Rowe, Shull said, was that “you always knew where you stood with him. He didn’t beat around the bush. With him, yes meant yes and no meant no. If you needed to be disciplined, you were. And if you needed to be praised, you were.
“A lot of people would call that the old school,” he said. “But I call it the right school.”
Rowe started his coaching career in Montesano in 1939 and later moved to Elma and Chehalis before ending up in Edmonds. At the time, Edmonds was less a suburb and more a community with its own distinct identity. There were, of course, no major professional sports in Seattle at the time, so the high school teams were hugely important not only to the students, but to folks in town.
In the early years, the high school was in downtown Edmonds at what is today the Edmonds Center for the Arts. The football team played its home games at Edmonds Civic Field — then as now, a dirt surface.
In the fall of 1957, a new school with an adjoining football stadium opened on the hill above town on what is today the site of Edmonds-Woodway High School.
When Rowe came to Edmonds, his was the only public high school in all of south Snohomish County. By the time he retired, there were five.
His teams started out in the Northwest League against foes like Snohomish, Burlington and Mount Vernon. Edmonds relocated to Seattle’s Metro League for a few years in the early 1960s, but then moved to the Western Conference.
His coaching philosophy was typical of that era. He loved physical football, and he preferred a punishing running game to an intricate passing attack. Neither did he favor coaches in the press box, sending down plays via headsets.
“He liked to put the game in the hands of the kids,” Mead said.
In other ways, though, Rowe was an innovator. Back in the 1950s, he devised a no-huddle offense, with his quarterback calling plays at the line of scrimmage. It gave fits to opposing defenses and helped Edmonds win a bunch of games.
“Quite a few guys are doing that today,” Shull said, “but it was almost unheard of back then. And it was a lot of fun.”
“He was on the cutting edge of offensive creativeness,” said Jerry Karnofski, who was an assistant coach under Rowe through the 1950s and early ’60s. “And he was highly, highly popular with his players. He had trust in his players and his players had trust in him.”
Rowe was 62 when he left coaching, but hardly ready to settle down. He lived near the Edmonds waterfront and spent many days in his boat, fishing the waters of Puget Sound. He also began making regular trips to Hawaii with his wife, and when she died in 1981, he moved there permanently. Former players would sometimes visit — among them, Mead and Lashua — and Rowe seemed to savor the chances to rekindle those long-ago memories.
Unwilling to stay idle, he took up running and competed regularly in half-marathons and 10Ks, still racing well into his late 80s.
“He just truly enjoyed running,” said his daughter Colleen Rowe. “He also did lots of writing and yard work. That’s why he liked Hawaii. He was able to do all those things.”
His health stayed good until last spring, when he fell a few times and was injured, “and that kind of started the whole thing going (downhill),” she said. Her father also had a minor stroke in recent weeks, but the cause of death was basically “old age.”
Coaching, she said, “was the highlight of his life. And he had so many stories he loved to tell.”
But mostly he liked to recall “the students he had. Because that’s what it was always about for him. Winning to him was never the big thing. It was the lessons that you learned with sports,” she said.
Others saw the same thing. He was, first and foremost, “a dedicated educator,” Shull said. “And he influenced a lot of people, a lot of lives. He was quite a man.”
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