Joanne Bowers

Last College: James Madison University Position: Head Coach Experience: Sixth Year

Media Bio

They say coaching is a fraternity. I've found a remarkable example here at UW where it's so much more than that.

Joanne and John Bowers coach with love. With dedication. With sacrifice and resilience.

Not just to their sports. To each other.

Joanne is in her fifth and most successful season leading the 15th-ranked Huskies gymnastics team, which hosts Michigan State Friday night at Alaska Airlines Arena in the last dual meet of the season. Bowers has senior-led Washington gunning for its first appearance as a team in the NCAA finals since 1998.

The reason she is here at UW? Five years ago, her husband John gave up a Division I football gig so his wife could take her first big-time head job in gymnastics.

"We've been married 30 years. I've followed him eight times," the gregarious Joanne told me, chuckling.

"This time, he followed me."

They married when she was a senior at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., months before she graduated in 1982 as a four-year letter winner and two-time team captain for JMU gymnastics. John had graduated from there three years earlier, after being captain of the football team and a letter winner in baseball for the Dukes. By 1982 he was coaching football at Division II Shepherd College.

And that's where the Bowers' 30 years of love, learning and leading college athletes began.

From Shepherdstown, W. Va., to Clarksville, Tenn., through Normal, Ill., to Ypsilanti, Mich., through Charleston, Ill., to Kent, Ohio, Sylvania, Ohio, and now Seattle, Joanne and John Bowers have raised two sons, coached day and night, gone on countless recruiting trips to far-flung towns - and, oh yeah, found time to be spouses.

Any parent, any child, can only imagine how difficult that's been. Yet here's Joanne today, the smiling, glib, revered coach who has taken Husky gymnastics from being ranked 48th out of 60 Division-I teams when she arrived in 2006 to 15th now, surging toward UW's first top-18 seed in the NCAA tournament during her tenure.

How much does Joanne Bowerslove her family and her gymnastics? She recently called me back to talk about her team and her career - from the hospital, hours after she had rushed her son in for suspected appendicitis. She was waiting as he was getting checked out.

The love is mutual.

"You should go to one of her banquets. I'm always amazed at Joanne's banquets, at how much those kids care for each other and how sad they are to be leaving the program," her husband says, proudly. "In football, some senior classes you can't wait for them to be gone. It's not that way with Joanne and her teams. They are so close."

Runs in the family.

As John coached college football from dawn past dusk for about 11¾ months a year over two decades, Joanne raised a son, coached club teams, judged gymnastics competitions and earned a master's degree, from Austin Peay University in Tennessee, while John was coaching there from 1984-87. She got her first college head coaching job, at Illinois State University from 1990-93, while John was an assistant there for the Redbirds' football team.

This unique ride hasn't always been smooth. John remembers how tough it was on Joanne when he was at Eastern Illinois, where there wasn't a college gymnastics program for her to coach. He knows the sacrifice she made giving up her head job at Illinois State to again become an overqualified club-team coach and a gymnastics judge while she moved with his football career in the mid `90s.

The hardest time for John was while Joanne was at Kent State.

They got to Ohio after Kent offered Joanne an assistant's job in its new gymnastics program in 1997. John was an assistant at Kent State that first year there, but then Eastern Michigan wanted him. He debated, but took the job. As he commuted three hours to Ypsilanti and stayed five days or more a week, Joanne stayed home to coach and nurture their new son, Ross, not yet a year old, and David, who was a freshman in high school at the time.

"That was a tough decision," John said. "But you coach as long as I have, eventually you are faced with tough decisions."

After 18 months, it was too tough. Dad was miserable away from Joanne and his family. "I went home on weekends and whenever else I could," John said. "At that point I realized that was not something we wanted to do."

So he left college football and became a phys-ed teacher at an elementary school near Kent, just so he could be home. He also became the defensive coordinator at Stow, Ohio, High School, where David was a freshman.

The Bowers were back together.

"That worked out great," John said.

The good karma extended to Joanne's teams. She helped lead Kent State to the 2001 Mid-American Conference title. The National Association of Collegiate Gymnastic Coaches for Women named Bowers the assistant coach of the year for the central region.

Michigan noticed. The Big Ten gymnastics power gave Bowers her career break by hiring her as a top assistant to focus primary on the beam and floor exercises.

By early 2006, life was semi-stable for the Bowers gang. John was in his fifth season coaching defensive backs at Bowling Green. Joanne was grooming some of her six All-Americas on the beam and seven on floor exercises during her five years at Michigan. She had just helped the Wolverines to a seventh-place finish at the 2006 NCAA championships. They lived about halfway between the two schools, in the Toledo suburb of Sylvania. It was a 45-minute commute to work for Joanne, a 30-minute one for John.

Ross was in elementary school. There was still some transition, and a big one: David was about to leave Grand Valley State University in Michigan and join the Army on a four-year enlistment as an infantryman. He was headed for war.

But compared to their nomadic decades before, life was stable. And stable was good.

"I was not looking for another job. I didn't apply anywhere," Joanne said. "But my head coach at the time at Michigan said she had gotten a phone call from the athletic director at Washington, who wanted to get a recommendation on me becoming their next coach."

Joanne, a native of Newport News, Va., didn't know Seattle from Sheboygan when then-Huskies AD Barbara Hedges called. But she saw a huge opportunity in Huskies gymnastics. It was one of only two Division-I programs on the West Coast between Sacramento, Calif., and Anchorage, Alaska (Oregon State is the other). It was in an attractive metropolis with a history of NCAA regional berths.

Joanne had just turned down an offer to be the head coach at UC Davis, which she didn't feel was a fit worth uprooting the family again. But UW seemed on the cusp of a breakthrough. And Bowers wanted to be the one leading it.

"It was a gold mine of an opportunity," she says now. "The administration said they wanted to move the program to the national level. That's all I needed to hear."

One problem: John was a Division I college football coach.

But this time, he decided it was time to move for his wife.

"She just had an opportunity that doesn't come by too often," he said. "In gymnastics, there are often no head jobs available. It's not like football (with twice as many D-I programs, 120). There aren't nearly as many open, especially ones that can really be a good program."

Joanne and John flew to Seattle in April 2006. Joanne was wowed seeing UW in person. John met with then-football coach Tyrone Willingham. They discussed John joining the Huskies' staff as a recruiting coordinator.

Joanne jumped at the job, thinking her husband could be at Washington with her. But by the time the Bowers made move number nine and Joanne was named the Huskies' fifth gymnastics coach, on June 7, 2006, UW had hired a web designer for the football recruiting opening that John had been eyeing.

John made the best of that jolt. He took a job as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for Western Washington University. He commuted 80 miles one way four and five days a week up Interstate 5 to Bellingham from the family's new home in suburban Bothell. Wouldn't you know it: After two seasons there, WWU disbanded its program to save money.

Did I mention the Bowers are resilient?

While Joanne was busy building the Huskies into an emerging power, John found a job an assistant football coach at Ballard High in Seattle. Yes, he was out of college football. But at least he didn't have to commute 150 miles a day to work.

"He misses college football very, very much," Joanne says.

John admits that, saying, "You do anything for 25 years, sure you are going to miss it."

But he's been having a ball being home again. He's been around for the holidays, taken his boys to Rose Bowls, coached Ross' eighth-grade basketball team. This fall he will join Bothell High's football staff, as Ross becomes a freshman quarterback. When I talked to John on Tuesday, he was preparing for an afternoon practice as Bothell's JV basketball coach. And he hopes to be its assistant baseball coach this spring.

He is immersing himself in Ross' high-school career, which he was unable to do for more than spurts with David. And now it's Joanne who's the one gone more.

"These last three years have been a really great learning experience for me," John said. "And, oh how Joanne has done a great job. I don't know that there's a harder working coaching staff in the country. She has meets on Friday nights, then goes out recruiting Saturdays and Sundays. She's really upped her time out, and it's paying off."

It's hard for Joanne and John to believe, but David is 27 now, and a war veteran. His four years in the Army included two combat tours of one year each in the wars against terror. He's now back finishing college as a second-semester sophomore at Ohio State.

"He wants to be a college football coach," John says, proudly.

Of course he does. He's a Bowers.

And Joanne has a place she'd love for him to work.

"I just think the world of the University of Washington -- and we've been to a lot of schools," she deadpanned.

"This is a special place."