Prep notebook: Veteran Wallace football coach Dave Rounds resigns

Every year for three decades, Wallace Miners football coach Dave Rounds arrived at this point in the spring looking forward to another season in the fall.

This spring, though, not so much. After much contemplation, he determined it was time to walk away.

Rounds, 58, handed in his resignation on Monday after 31 years, the last 23 as head coach.

“I still love football, but I’m not as passionate about it as I should be,” Rounds said. “It’s a feeling. I just know it.”

Rounds’ teams were a combined 121-91.

He will decide early next month if he’ll retire from his teaching position and as athletic director.

“Over spring break I decided I was done,” Rounds said.

To hear Rounds tell it, he got to do what he always wanted to do, and he never had to leave his home. He was a 1976 Wallace graduate.

“I used to tell people back in high school I’d be the head coach some day,” said Rounds, who never married. “Not too many people can say they got the job they wanted. I never really had to leave the area. I bought the house I grew up in from my mother.”

It just took Rounds time to earn his college degree. It took him about 10 years to finish 6 1/2 years of college.

“The first 4 1/2 years were my drinking years,” Rounds said.

He started coaching as an assistant for his late high school coach, Norm Walker, his mentor, in 1983.

“He talked me into going back to college after I quit the first time,” Rounds said. “He kind of lit the fire and gave me my first opportunity.”

Rounds plans on spending a lot of time golfing, hunting birds and fishing – things that had to take a back seat to coaching.

“Last year it (coaching) was a lot of time and effort,” Rounds said. “I was getting home at 9 o’clock every night in the fall. I’m leaving on my terms. Nobody wants me fired right now. If somebody wanted me fired, I’d probably stay.”

A referee once suggested that Rounds should become an official after he retired.

That won’t happen, he said.

“I told him I’d have to learn the rules,” Rounds said.

Double duty

Ferris has hired a girls soccer coach. And it’s an old new coach.

Robin Crain, the Saxons boys coach who once also coached the girls, will return to the post in the fall.

The boys coach since 1997, Crain coached the girls previously from 1996-2006, winning two league championships. He also coached the North Central girls one season in 1993.

His boys teams have captured seven Greater Spokane League titles, one state title and finished state runner-up three times.

No. 13 in nation

The Gonzaga Prep girls basketball team, which fell 60-59 to Miami Country Day at the Dick’s Sporting Goods/ESPN national invitational tournament last Friday in New York, is ranked No. 13 in the CBS MaxPreps Xcellent 25 rankings.

The Bullpups didn’t move a spot from the previous week. Miami Country Day went on to avenge a regular-season loss to in-state rival Dillard of Fort Lauderdale, taking the title game 57-41 on Saturday at Madison Square Garden.