Chet Hovde Retires After 40 Year Coaching Career

Everett, WA - An icon of Everett Community College women's basketball, Chet Hovde has announced his retirement after 34 seasons at the helm of Trojan Women's Hoops and 36 years with the college.  At that time, Jimmy Carter was president, Space Invaders was the most popular video game, and My Sharona topped the Billboard 100 hit songs list. 

Coach Hovde first came to EvCC in 1978 as the men's assistant coach in which the team went 21-8, won a region championship, and placed 5^th in the NWAACC tournament.  The next season, he joined the women's basketball program as an assistant, just in its 2^nd year of NWAACC sanctioned existence, and took over midway through the 1979-1980 season as the head coach for Ken Cobb who stepped down in January.  

An opportunity then became available at his alma mater, the University of Puget Sound in the fall of 1980 to coach the women's team there.  The Loggers had two winning seasons with Hovde before he decided to return to the Everett CC women's program and assisted Doug Nixon for the 1982-1983 season where the team went 23-7 and finished 3^rd in the NWAACC tournament.

Chet would get another head coaching opportunity at rival Edmonds Community College in the 1985-1986 season.  He took over a program that could not consistently fill a full roster and took the Tritons to two straight 20 win seasons for the first time in program history, finishing the '86-'87 season 4th in the NWAACC and is to date the highest finish in Edmonds CC women's basketball history.   

His success would bring him back to his hometown of Everett for the '88-'89 season, where he would take over an EvCC women's basketball program that had not won a game over the past two seasons.  Coach Hovde led the team to nine wins in his first full season as the head women's coach at EvCC and then went on to rack up 442 career wins over the next 32 years taking the Trojans to 14 NWAC tournaments and winning three North Region Championships.

Coach Hovde's coaching career spanned 40 years of which he coached hundreds of young women, most of which have gone on to four year universities to continue their basketball careers and education while some even became coaches themselves. 

Prior to coaching Chet was a 1st team all state basketball player at Everett High before he was recruited on a full ride scholarship to the University of Washington in 1965.  He played for the Huskies for two seasons before transferring to the University of Puget Sound to finish out his junior and senior year, earning his bachelor's degree in education. 

"Chet has been a fixture of this program for nearly four decades, said Everett Athletic Director Garet Studer.  There has been a lot of successes with his teams over the years, but even more important than that was his dedication to all those young women, and the impact that he has had on their lives.  The Trojan Nation wishes him and his wife Joan a happy retirement!"

With the 2021-2022 season just 4 months away, the search for the next head coach of EvCC women's basketball has already begun and the new head coach will be announced publicly later today.