Dave Boling: A CrossFit champion. Helping lead an Italian football team. What will former Gonzaga coach Julie Holt do next?

“I’m old, but I look good for an old lady.” – Julie Holt

Coaches leave, time passes, fans might not stay current with their careers.

A colorful and fiery character, Julie Holt coached the Gonzaga women’s basketball team in the early 1990s with an unforgettable fervency.

Decades later, former players start describing her with the word “competitive,” but then decide it’s too weak an adjective to capture the bulging-neck-vein stage Holt sometimes reached, and they upgrade their assessment to “very, very intense.”

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the 66-year-old Holt has re-created herself while we weren’t watching. As age-group champion at the CrossFit Games in 2022, she earned the title: “Fittest Woman on Earth (65-plus).”

She’s also still coaching: with husband Nick, for the Varese Skorpions in the Italian Football League.

Yes, football. Played by men. In Europe.

Consider it illustrative that neither of these extraordinary developments shocks anyone who played for her – almost as if they knew when she left Gonzaga that she would challenge the world.

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“I would say I am not one bit surprised she is CrossFit champion of the world. That’s a good outlet for her intensity and strength.” – Heidi (Phillips) Doolittle, former Zags basketball player.

Look at Julie Holt’s bio page on the CrossFit website and in the graphic that proclaims her “Fittest on Earth,” you’ll see a photo in which her musculature is evidence she is capable of delivering a beating, but her hair is scrunchy-ed back into a perky side-pony.

She has lived with this combination of ferocity and whimsy for a long time.

“I remember when she was pregnant with her first child, Julie was in the weight room training with us until about the day before she gave birth,” Doolittle recalled. “All of us were like, ‘whoa, dang.’ ”

Holt’s workouts from that time – as if training for a maternity-division competition – stuck out in Sarah Christensen’s memory, too. “She had to be close to eight-and-a-half months pregnant and she was busting out sets of dips in the weight room and then running on the track,” she said.

A self-proclaimed gym-rat all her life, Holt said she got into CrossFit training roughly 10 years ago.

“With my personality, I like doing stuff that’s hard and challenging and difficult,” Holt said. “What’s awesome about it is you’re training and working with people who are willing to do something hard.”

Of the six events (testing strength, endurance and fitness) in her age group at last year’s world championships in Madison, Wisconsin, Holt finished first in four, winning by a large margin.

Holt’s father was a running back at Michigan in the 1950s. Growing up in Texas, she took to basketball early and lettered four years at Stephen F. Austin. As a coach for 25 years at various places, she always stressed strength and conditioning.

“We had morning weights and afternoon workouts and practices and study hall,” Christensen said. “But all the hard work created a sense of family.”

Holt finds that, now, at the CrossFit gym.

“Most of the people I train with are 30 or 40 years younger than me,” she said. “Every day is different. You’re shocking your nervous system. It’s competitive, you vs. you, and you better leave your ego at the door because you’re going to get your teeth knocked out at some point. But it’s all fun. I love it, and I’m 66 and still able to do it – and do it well.”

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“What do I remember about Julie? First and foremost, her fiery personality … she is a very, very intense person.” – Ivy Safranski, former player.

“She could light you up,” Christensen said of Holt’s occasional outbursts, on the practice floor and in games. “She wore those high heels and she could stomp those suckers into the floor like they were made of steel, and really let the refs hear some choice words.”

Holt had been head coach at Nevada-Reno (at age 24) and Pacific before GU. Her 1994 team registered a Zags-best 21-10 record and earned a WNIT appearance. She left then to join her husband at Idaho, and the two have lived the coaches’ vagabond lives ever since.

“She was very organized and we always knew what we were doing,” Safranski said of Holt’s practices. “With her being so competitive and intense, there were some personality conflicts – you can either connect or clash – but it worked for me. I connected.”

Doolittle came from Canada and had never had the rigorous practices and training that was part of the Holt program. “Wow, soooo intense. She was demanding, but also, if you did well, she could make it fun.”

Players recall Holt trying to loosen them up if they were playing tight in certain games. “I think it was against USF, at timeouts she was reading us ‘The Little Engine That Could’,” Safranski said.

At another time, she changed up the halftime routine by calling everybody up and having them dance “The Hokey Pokey.”

“She was the first coach who introduced me to visualization,” Doolittle said. “Before tipoff she’d have us lie down and take us through imagining ourselves hitting the winning basket. That felt like cutting edge back in 1991 or ’92.”

Safranski was impressed after early-morning weight-room sessions when Holt would send them off to their classes with an upbeat ritual. “She’d have us meet her at the door and scream ‘Great Day,’ throwing our arms up in the air. It was all about mindset and trying to have a positive perspective on everything.”

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“They all smoke. Before our first practice, guys were lighting up. At halftime, guys are lighting up cigarettes. Nick and I are looking around like, ‘what is happening?’ ” – Julie Holt on coaching football to Italians.

The Varese Skorpions website lists Julie Holt as “assistant coach.” Her husband calls her director of football operations. Julie says her job is more “director of Nick.”

“She tells me what I’m doing wrong,” he said. Nick Holt’s career has included two seasons as head coach at Idaho and another 30 or so as a defensive assistant or coordinator or associate head coach (Washington) – the highlight being his stretch under Pete Carroll at USC that included the 2003 national championship.

“She loves to coach,” Nick Holt said. “Whatever we need, Julie does. And she’s a great ambassador for our football team.”

Holt heard about the opening from a friend three years ago and the couple decided to make the move. Initially, the Skorpions were in the Italian Football League’s Division II, but under the Holts have advanced to Division I, and this spring made it to the league semifinals.

“Northern Italy is beautiful … so much to do; the people are great, the food is fantastic and they love American football,” Nick said. “The players love to get coached and get better.”

A perk to compensate for the second-hand smoke: “They gave us a great villa to live in, a four-bedroom place in this little village at the base of a mountain outside Varese,” Julie said.

Neither Holt speaks Italian, so communication is sometimes a problem. Despite being told to punt on fourth-and-30, for instance, a misguided Skorpion decided it was a good idea to take off running on fourth-and-30. It looked fine as he picked up 28 yards, only to step out of bounds to avoid contact just short of the first.

The camaraderie is first-rate, though, Julie said. And when she jumps in with an instruction, the players respond: “Yes, sir!”

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“I feel a sense of debt to Julie; not so much to Gonzaga University, but to Julie. She was a role model for strong women, physically and otherwise.” – Ivy Safranski

When Julie Holt was playing at Stephen F. Austin, her nationally ranked team wasn’t allowed to have uniforms in the school’s color because the color purple was deemed too expensive.

“There were a lot of (inequities), never getting time in the gym, things like that, and we outdrew our men’s team,” Holt said. “I always wanted women to have a chance. When I was coaching at different places, I just wanted to try to make it right. I didn’t want to take away anything from the guys’ wrestling teams, but to do better for us.”

When her two sons (Nick V and Ben) arrived, and her husband was moving around, she backed away from the demands of being a head coach.

“Once I stopped coaching, it was hard for me to even watch women’s basketball because I missed it so much,” she said. “I guess I made up for it by over-coaching my kids and my husband.”

Second son Ben, when playing linebacker at Purdue, was asked by the Lafayette Journal & Courier if it was tough playing for his father (his position coach): “If we could survive mom, we could survive anybody.”

Julie Holt’s toughness was a legacy that went far beyond the blood line.

“That woman, she walked her talk,” Safranski said. “She was that gal. When she told you to run, you knew she was doing it, too. She worked out fiercely.”

Doolittle said that if she goes a day without working out, “to this day, I feel guilty about it, I feel her pressure.”

Doolittle said that whenever her husband senses her getting indignant about something, he claims it’s the residue of Holt’s influence.

“I have a lot of respect for her,” Doolittle said. “She taught me, as a woman, to fight and stick up for myself. I attribute my fighting spirit to Julie. I try to instill that in my daughter every chance I get: If you want something, you have to get in there and fight for it.”

How else will you conquer the world?