Gonzaga Prep coach Billy Barmes the guide on Bullpups’ journey to success
Long before the Bullpups’ recent trip to the top of the Greater Spokane League, second-year coach Billy Barmes embarked on a 14-year odyssey that took him into the darkness of war, its gray aftermath and back to the light.
And if the experience sometimes felt like one big offsides trap, that too is part of the journey, one which also shaped his “transformational” coaching style. During practices, the 31-year-old Barnes and his players “talk about the mindset that you need – that we never really arrive, that it’s about the process.”
For Barmes, the process began in 2002 back in Illinois, where he enlisted in the Army National Guard at the age of 17, partly to serve his country but also to earn money for college.
After one year at the University of Illinois, he was deployed to Iraq. Sometimes he manned a truck-mounted .50-caliber machine gun, protecting convoys from an unseen enemy during a 15-month tour that was interrupted only by a trip to see his father die from melanoma.
Released from active duty in 2005, Barmes struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. With the help of his mother, he pulled himself together, earned degrees in sports management and coaching and began a new journey into the vagabond world of coaching.
After a one-year stint as a graduate assistant at Southern Mississippi in 2009, Barmes said he applied for every Division I assistant job from Florida to Hawaii. After a fruitless search the following summer, he caught a break when Illinois needed to fill a last-minute vacancy.
That lasted one year. In 2011 his life took a welcome detour to Spokane after Gonzaga coach Amy Edwards called with an offer. “I’ve heard good things about you,” she told him.
Barmes loved the job, which carried him through the 2013 season, but his life’s journey was moving a little too quickly. “The life of a Division I assistant was a little too wearing on a young family,” he said, explaining his decision to seek a teaching certificate through the Master of Initial Teaching program at Gonzaga.
Now in the second year of a two-year program, Barmes is student-teaching full time at Garfield Elementary. He coached for a year with the Spokane Shadow, then learned about the opening at G-Prep.
Hired shortly before the season began, Barmes and his young team endured the growing pains of an 8-7-2 season and a last-place finish in the 4A ranks of the GSL.
“It was a little slow, turning around the mindset of the program,” Barmes said. “But I believed that we were going to have success because of how hard we worked in practice.”
The work is paying off this year. While most of the top GSL programs suffered heavily through graduation, the Bullpups returned 10 starters and a solid corps of underclassmen.
Alone among the GSL coaches, he picked Prep to win the league. So far, so good: The Bullpups are 5-0 in the GSL and 7-2 overall with four regular-season matches left.
For that, Barmes credits the players. He said that senior midfielder Annie Clark is the team’s most improved player, “and is the most consistent at doing her job in our system,” Barmes said of Clark, who will play next year at Pacific University in Oregon.
In the back, Barmes said he can count on senior Melissa Symmes, who’s anchored a defense that’s given up just three goals in five matches. Symmes, who’s bound for Boise State next season, “is dynamic, loves to run, and she’s athletic enough to let me give her the freedom she wants,” Barmes said.
The Bullpups got a bonus this year in senior Larkin Russell, who played for the school as a freshman but spent the last two years playing for a club team in Colorado. “She’s extraordinarily talented, but I had nothing to do with her development,” Barmes said of Russell, who will play next year at the University of Portland.