Kathy Holmgren is house hunting again. So are Margie Green and Linda Snyder.
Uprooting her life at a moment`s notice, whether she wants to or not, is second nature to a football coach`s wife, who can count on leaving town every few years.
Margie Green will soon be chatting with real-estate brokers in Minneapolis, now that her husband, Dennis Green, has left Stanford to be head coach of the Vikings. Margie, who has lived in five cities in 25 years, never has wanted to leave any of them.
”I can`t remember ever wanting to go,” she said. ”But this will be the first time I won`t have kids at home and in school, and it will make it so much easier.”
The Greens, whose two daughters are 20 and 24, have been in Santa Cruz, Calif., for six years. ”That`s the longest time we`ve ever lived anywhere.” Linda Snyder, wife of former Cal coach Bruce Snyder, now head coach at Arizona State, is flying to Tempe this weekend for a house-hunting trip. This will be the eighth move for the Snyders and their three children.
”Join the Army and see the world; marry a coach, see the USA,” said Linda Snyder, who has lived in Oregon, New Mexico, Utah (twice), Los Angeles
(twice), the Bay area and now Arizona.
”Bruce and I are both California natives, and I was so happy when we moved back here five years ago, so this move is a real tug. In the time I have left, I want to go to the ocean and the wine country as much as I can, so I really have that ingrained in my memory.”
Next stop for the Holmgrens, now that former 49er offensive coordinator Mike Holmgren has become head coach of the Packers: Green Bay, a historic sports town with a football widow in every house.
The nomadic life of a football coach has taken the Holmgren family-twins Jenny and Calla, 18, Emily 14, and Gretchen, 10-to four cities in 11 years, a far less disruptive life than most.
Even though both the Holmgrens grew up in the Bay area, this is the right time to leave, Kathy Holmgren said. ”If the family had said no, Mike wouldn`t have taken the job.”
That was the case two years ago, when Mike signed his current contract with the 49ers. The twins were high school juniors; Kathy had a satisfying job as a radiation therapy nurse. ”The twins were ready to move, but I felt it would be too disruptive.”
”In Utah, where we lived for four years, we were on a first-name basis with everyone. But it was hard living in a Mormon community when that is not your religion. It wasn`t that hard to leave.
”This time, it`s different,” she said, once again uprooting her life for the man she has known since they met at church camp in Santa Cruz when they were both 13.
”When he was 15, he sent me a card and proposed. It was a given we would get married one day, although I wanted to be a missionary and he didn`t.”
Mike Holmgren was a San Francisco native who was ”all-star everything in high school and at USC” and wanted to do ”his football thing,” said his wife. They attended different colleges; she studied nursing and spent a year in Africa as a medical missionary while he began his coaching career. When she returned, they married.
That first move-from San Francisco to San Jose, where Mike got a job as a high school coach-was easy. ”The houses were cheap. There were no kids to uproot from school. I thought we`d live in that little house in San Jose forever,” she said, laughing at her naivete.
”We are looking at this move to Green Bay as a semi-permanent one, maybe 10 years,” she said, still a little naive. But they will spend summers here at the family cabin in Santa Cruz, near the place where the Holmgrens met.
Kathy returned from her first house-hunting trip to Green Bay empty-handed last weekend.
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”It used to be easier to find a house,” she admits. ”I would find a neighborhood that looked nice and a house that suited us the best. I wasn`t fussy.
”But there isn`t that much available out there right now, and I guess I`ve become fussier.”
It will help her immeasurably to have a fat checkbook (Holmgren`s new contract is for $2.5 million over five years) and real-estate brokers at her beck and call, along with welcome-wagon committees from the NFL.
Given the reality that most NFL coaches fail (one-third of the teams in the NFL changed coaches this year), Kathy Holmgren may be house hunting again in the not-too-distant future.
But that`s down the road. Last Thursday, when Kathy should have been frantically packing up her house, she calmly was entertaining guests.
”The movers do it all. They come in one day and pack it up and move it out the next day.”
She seems to be one of those unflappable human beings who probably won`t mind when the wind-chill factor goes below zero. She`ll just bundle up and become a rabid Packers fan.
Of course, she`s used to the cold. At Candlestick Park, instead of sitting with the chardonnay sippers in the box seats, she preferred the windy upper deck, ”where the screamers sit. We`re all screamers in our family.”