Once a Condor, always a Condor, from student to teacher and now into retirement — for Louise Holmes, school’s out forever!
She made that official on Thursday, June 19, the last day of classes before exam week at Duchess Park Secondary School.
A steady stream of students came by with cards, gifts and hugs to thank their phys-ed teacher and coach for the effort she put into making their high school a better place during her 35-year teaching career.
Evidence of the hours of before- and after-school time Holmes and her husband Dave poured into Duchess Park basketball programs developing skills and strategies that put the Condors on top of the roost are the banners that decorate the walls of Duchess Park gym. Together, they masterminded numerous zone titles and city championships and brought two provincial double-A girls basketball banners back to Prince George.
Louise bleeds black and yellow, the Duchess Park colours. She grew up in Prince George and attended the old Duchess Park school that stood until the new building opened in 2010. It’s where she began her teaching career in 1990 after graduating from University of Victoria and she’s been there ever since.
“I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve love my career,” she said. “I’m truly blessed with people I’ve worked with and the relationships I have with the student-athletes that are still in my life. I’ve been to weddings and baby showers.”
“There’s been challenges along the way, bureaucracy, like any institution, and you just have to accept that that’s the way it has to be.”
Louise met her husband Dave at UVic while she was playing as a guard for the junior varsity team. Dave started at Pince George Secondary in 1990 and taught at Duchess for five years. He also taught the alternate education program at the John McInnis Centre and at College Heights Secondary before he got into administration. He was a vice-principal at several elementary schools before finishing his career on March 31, after a three-month stint as interim principal at Duchess.
Dave did some tree-planting during his university years, working out of Prince George, and that was always the plan to return home for Louise, who graduated from Duchess in 1985. She was a science teacher briefly, but phys-ed was her forté. They were Condor coaches for most of their 35 years except when their kids were small and too young to play for school teams, when they coached them in minor basketball and youth soccer.
The kids — Luke, Emily and Rachael — grew up in the gym. Luke, the oldest, born in 1995, went on to play for the UNBC Timberwolves soccer team, while Emily, born in 1997, was the starting point guard for UNBC during a five-year career from 2015-20. Rachael, now 25, played for Condors senior team but didn’t play college basketball.
Dave was a UNBC assistant coach on the women’s team starting in 2002 and Louise joined him as a TWolves assistant during Emily’s five-year career. He said having a like-minded partner who had to balance teaching schedules and school team commitments with family life raising three kids made it easier to handle the demands on their time.
"Because we have the same values and value sport and being involved as coaches and teachers and teacher leaders and educators and working with youth that really gave us the freedom to support each other through those 35 years, otherwise it might have been a challenge for lot of marriages," said Dave."We've always had each other's back when we needed it to support each other through the good times and not-so good times."
Louise and Dave coached the Condors senior girls basketball team that successfully defended its double-A championship in 1996, and Louise was the head coach of the silver medalists in 1997. She teamed up with Al Erricson in 2000 the 2000 to win another senior girls BC banner.
Jay Anna Major, Elisha Williams and Emily King played volleyball and basketball and won four provincial titles during that two school-year span from 1995-97. Major said Louise set such a strong example, many of the players she mentored as a coach came back to be coaches at the school.
“I'm proud to say she was not only my coach but also my mentor, friend, and teammate,” said Major. “She is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met and there are things she has taught me over the past 30 years have truly shaped the person I have become. Her love of team sport and competition is second to none.
“Duchess Park will surely miss this amazing woman.”
Duchess Park was in decline as an inner-city school when the district decided in the late 1980s to make it the site of the French immersion high school program, which gave kids the opportunity to get around catchment barriers and play for the Condors because it was choice school that offered a specialized program.
“Our enrolment at Duchess was really starting plummet and our catchment was aging out,” she said. “D.P. Todd and College Heights were getting full because that’s where the development was and PGSS was pretty full at the time, too, and they wanted it in the Bowl, so it was either us or PGSS.
“I know people have complained (about the stacked Duchess teams) but it was a legit process.”
Prince George teachers went on strike a few times during her career and they were off the job for five weeks in 2014, in a work stoppage that ate into two school years. Rather than gripe about having to walk the picket line, Louise took the opportunity to get to know other teachers from different fields who she didn’t often meet. It was a chance put a positive spin on an unpleasant duty.
The pandemic years were hard on students and teachers and school teams suffered. The kids that started out as Grade 8s when the pandemic was first raging on are now this year’s graduating class. During the first year, when everybody was self-isolating being sequestered in small groups Louise taught them phys-ed for six weeks and didn’t see them again the rest of the semester. In 2021 the Condors played volleyball in empty gyms and were just about to start basketball season when the virus flared up again and the rate of infections rose, shutting them down again.
“We weren’t allowed to travel with the team and basketball got big-time impacted because it was winter,” she said. “We did exhibition games because we couldn’t have at tournament and the logistics of that was so stressful.”
As a coach, and through her affiliation with BC School Sports as president of the North Central District Athletic Association since 2012 and as athletic director at Duchess Park since 1992, Louise has had an influence in the way school sports are governed which has helped level the playing field for teams from outside of the population centres in the Lower Mainland and Victoria.
Teams from the north still have to travel a lot if they want to compete with the best of their provincial peers but the odds are quite as stacked against them as they once were. Each zone gets three votes in BCSS decisions.
“Back when I started doing it, you would get proxy votes from member schools and I would go down there with 15 proxy votes of the 28 schools we have in our zone, well somebody in the Lower Mainland would show up with 75 proxy votes, it was completely unbalanced,” she said.
“So the new governance model is the bigger picture of educators understanding what school sports can bring to everybody. It’s a lot more global, a lot more perspective on why school sports are important for everybody, not just the one going on to Division 2 scholarship.”
In May, Louise received the 2024-25 BC School Sports Honour Award, the highest distinction BCSS can bestow on an individual, for her decades of dedication to school sports as a coach, administrator and tournament organizer.
She knows she’s made an impact on many of the students she’s coached, even some of the ones who had absolutely no interest in sports who she helped convince to show up every day for gym class.
“Kids can rise up to any bar that you set for them, and I believe we can help them learn so many things that are bigger than the sport” said Louise. “I hope that besides the X’s and O’s of basketball that I’ve helped them learn stuff about themselves, pushed their limits, and have taught them things that will stand them in good stead the rest of their life.”
Louise, 58, and Dave, 60, have a trip to Mexico planned for November and are looking forward to having flexibility in their schedules. They want to play more golf or pickleball or some other physical activity or spend some time with seniors. Louise plans to go back coaching the senior girls at Duchess Park and they will both continue running the city basketball championships.
“It’s my happy place,” she said. “I wouldn’t have stuck to it all this time if it wasn’t.”
