By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sports Paper
Four years ago, North Kitsap District School teacher Clary Carlsen ended 35 years of coaching at the middle school, junior high and high school levels to have more time for his growing extended family. Now he is taking the final step – full retirement.
“I have 7,914 days in and I have to go to 7,020,” said Carlsen on last Friday (June 7). “That is 39 years (180 school days a year times 39). My last day is the 17th.”
His teaching and coaching colleagues couldn’t wait until the last day to honor him. On Thursday (June 6) they presented him with a lawn chair with an umbrella attached to it and on the back of it they had engraved, “What a Great Day!” with little fish symbols surrounding it because of his well-known fishing hobby.
“I thought that was pretty cool,” said the man who made teaching and coaching cool to the kids that were privileged to have been in his PE classes or coached by him.
Carlsen and wife Sandy raised four very athletic boys – Ben, Jeff, Clary Jr. and Chris, and all of them got a double dose of his influence, first as a dad and second as teacher and coach as they came through the NK school system.
And they all have heard thousands of times the words that have made Carlsen famous: “What a Great Day!” that he lays on everybody all day every day.
“They (his fellow teachers) tease me that they don’t know what they will do because nobody is going to walk down the halls every day and say, “What a Great day!’ “ Carlsen says. “They have threatened to record me so they can play it with the morning bulletin.”
That might work, he says, for a couple years, but then the new group of kids who don’t know him and the tradition would wonder what the heck is going on?
So the habit of Carlsen walking down the hallways at Poulsbo Middle School, where he has been for 35 of his 39 teaching years (he started out at Sterling Junior High in Wenatchee) and brightening up the day for everybody with this: “Can you believe it? It’s Monday and we have five days of school this week. It doesn’t get any better than this” will die out soon. The silence will be deafening.
It’s difficult to quantify the positive impact Carlsen has had on kids in the NK school system. The guess is that he has had a huge impact on thousands of them. And not just in the classroom, but on the field of competition too.
Carlsen has over the years coached junior high or middle school volleyball, girls soccer, boys and girls track and field, football and baseball. He also helped establish the North Kitsap Athletic & Activities Alliance (NKAAA) and helped out in baseball and football at North Kitsap High School, and now that he is really, really retiring, coaches at the high school ask him all the time if he would come back and help them coach. And he may do that.
But right now he’s looking forward to spending more time with his extended family, especially the grandkids – son Ben’s two boys, Sawyer, 6, and Owen, 4, Jeff’s two kids, son Tanner, almost 5, and daughter Chloe, who will be one next month, and Chris’s daughter Kami, who will be two in July. Son Chris lives the bachelor life in Hawaii.
It’s quite possible all five grandkids have already caught on to what a great day it is. And it certainly is if they are around him and Sandy.
Once a year his extended family gathers at his and Sandy’s house for a weekend of fishing. That means brother’s Ron, Jon, George and sister Barbara Scott’s families come and pitch tents and take their boats out to see who is the champion fisherman. Then at night they sit around the campfire and share stories about the “big” one that got away.
“We go fishing together for bragging rights,” says Carlsen. “That’s what it is all about. We sit around the campfire and talk family stories – remember when dad did this? Remember when this happened to you? Of course, I always talk about the ones that got away, and grow a little bit bigger when I catch them.
“The younger generations just sit around and smile and listen to all the stories, and then they tell their own.”
Some of the following is from a story written by me for the Kitsap Sun four years ago. It sheds some light on what has made Carlsen who he is.
Carlsen chokes up when he talks about his deceased parents – Clarence and Mary Carlsen. They are his idols and the reason why he is what he is, a man who for so long has had a large impact on so many with the positive and sunny personality his parents instilled in him.
A football and track and field athlete at West Seattle High School, Carlsen got his athletic genes from his father, a talented athlete whose baseball career got sidetracked by a need to work. And from both parents he got the positive outlook on life that has been a large and looming fixture around Poulsbo, from the fields and gyms of athletic competition to the classrooms of academic pursuit.
When Carlsen says, ““What a great day!” it’s not a rote mantra he says with his easy smile. It’s a genuine expression of affection – love – he is willing upon others, who may desperately need it to hold back the black clouds that may hover over them like Charlie Brown in the Peanuts’ cartoon character.
No matter the weather, no matter the situation, Carlsen sees the good in the day.
“He’s one of the most positive of people I have ever met in my life,” says friend Virg Taylor, who coached with Carlsen in baseball and football at North Kitsap High School. “He’ll say, “What a great day’ and he says it every day to all his kids in all his classes and when he coached he said that to every team he coached every day.”
It all comes from his parents, who raised five kids. Clarence and Mary Carlsen didn’t believe in giving their children everything. Instead, they spoiled their kids with their time, a lesson that has served Carlsen well in his own life.
“They didn’t shower us with junk,” says Carlsen. “We weren’t hurting or anything. We just didn’t have fancy or flashy. They gave us their time. I was always told by my parents to give your kids time. You can never give them too much of that. You can give them too much of other things, but you can never give them enough of your time. Give them all you got.”
When Carlsen talks about his parents – his father died in 1986, his mother four and half years ago – it brings tears to his eyes.
“They were just wonderful, loving people,” he says. “They loved people, and they were nice to people. They were just special parents. When you get special parents and you go on and teach and coach other kids, you learn how to love them the way you were loved as a kid.”
So defiantly, Carlsen wakes up every day with a warm smile on his face and gentleness in his heart and wishes a great day on everybody he meets.
“He’s very positive,” says another longtime friend and coaching colleague at North Kitsap High School, Steve Frease. “I think he’s a realist, but he tries to put a plus spin on everything – even when I out-fish him.”
That last remark is an inside joke between Frease, who teaches PE at North Kitsap and is a former baseball and football coach at the school, and Carlsen, his former assistant, who have fished together for years and still haven’t settled their friendly debate who is the best fisherman. Sometimes the fish seem to swim on Frease’s side of the boat and sometimes on Carlsen’s side.
“Steve is the best netter,” says Carlsen, his big smile bigger than usual.
Carlsen graduated from Central Washington and did his student teaching with Les Eathorne at Bremerton’s East High in 1973. He counts Eathorne as being his first coaching mentor. Jerry Parrish, Frease, Jeff Weible, Taylor, the late John Broderson and Jim Harney have been others who he says have been important figures to him in his own coaching profession.
Including youth sports, Carlsen coached for over 100 sports’ seasons.
He also coached all four of his sons ‑ Ben, the oldest, Jeff and Clary Jr. (both played minor league baseball, Jeff with the Chicago Cubs and Clary Jr. with Philadelphia) and youngest son Chris, who played football at Eastern Washington.
“I’ve had the good fortune to work with a lot of good men,” says Trish Olson, who team-taught PE with Carlsen. “He’s right there at the top. He’s the salt of the earth.”
“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like Clary Carlsen,” says Taylor, “ and I’m glad to call him my friend.”
Now it’s time to turn the chapter and close the book on teaching for Carlsen. Now he will have more time to fish, more time to putter around in his garden, which he loves to do, and more time to spend with the grandkids, which as one might expect is first on the to-do list.
“I will miss it,” Carlsen says of teaching, “but it’s time to do something different. Family is so important to us (he and Sandy) and I need to give more time to that.”
It’s typical of Carlsen that by retiring he sees the positive for somebody else. His leaving, he says, opens a spot for somebody else to get hired, and in a troubled economy that is forcing the NK School District to rift teachers, this is a positive.
Of course, it’s always been positive for Carlsen.
“Every day is a great day,” he says. “Every day we get is a good day.”
Then as we parted, Carlsen couldn’t help himself.
“And you have a great day!” he quickly added.
