Molahiette drill team coaches call it a day
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Molahiettes Assistant Coach Idalis Anezcua, Head Coach Lori Baker and Assistant Coach Peggy Earl. All three are retiring – Baker and Earl to spend more time with their families, and Anezcua to pursue her studies.
MOSES LAKE — When Lori Baker took the microphone, she said she was going to try and not cry.
But it wasn’t working. And she was crying.
“Tonight is a celebration of all the things we did this year,” Baker told a room full of high school girls, their siblings and their parents on Monday at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center.
“When the school year started, I knew I would retire, “ Baker continued. “I promised my family, and I need to keep my word.”
She paused and took a breath.
“There was never a good year to retire. The were girls I wanted to stay for, parents who said ‘you need to coach my daughter,’” she said.
“It’s really awesome to take girls at the beginning of the year who are lost, and don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. “We’ve had some pretty big successes, accomplished a lot of things. That’s all I ask, and they did it.”
“I love this program,” she said as the tears choked her up again. “I love what it stands for.”
By “program,” Baker means the Molahiettes, the Moses Lake High School drill and dance team that has taken home several cases worth of trophies — state and national — and that she has coached for the last 12 years.
This year was her last, and this annual banquet their tearful goodbye. Along with her assistant coaches Peggy Earl and Idalis Anezcua, she is retiring this year.
Baker and Earl both own and manage Today’s Generation, a dance studio in Moses Lake.
“I have 12 grandkids and they live all over and I want to spend time with them,” Baker said.
It was a sentiment Earl echoed, right down to the number of grandchildren.
“It takes a ton of time, so much more time than people realize,” to coach and manage the Molahiettes, Earl said. “Each year for the last five years, I don’t know whether to leave or stay. It’s getting really exhausting.”
Anezcua, who only graduated from MLHS three years ago and was herself a Molahiette “all four years,” is going on to study nursing full time in the fall.
“Drill team is very challenging, but rewarding,” she said.
Baker said she coached for as long as she did because she likes working with the kids.
“I do it because of the girls,” she said. “I think that working on a competition team like we do, you learn lots of life skills — working to a goal, pushing yourself.”
“It’s a labor of love,” Earl said. “There’s not a girl we don’t care about. They are such a joy.”
Both Earl and Baker wanted all the parents and students gathered on Monday to know that while winning is good — and the Molahiettes have won a lot — they accomplish all their goals simply by training hard and competing well.
And their departure has left “some big shoes to fill” at MLHS.
“This was an extremely hard decision,” Earl said. “It was a labor of love.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.