Former Wolf great Ashley Ellsworth-Bagby goes out for a bit of fishin’ with the old man, as former CHS football guru Ron Bagby pilots the craft.
Was there ever a more deceptive athlete than Ashley Ellsworth-Bagby?
She would step on the basketball court at Coupeville High School, looking like she was 10, with her short pig-tails jutting up in the air, and other teams would wonder why the ball girl had gotten herself a uniform. And then, in an instant, she would flip the switch and slice the unsuspecting fools off right at the knee.
Spinning and wheeling and dealing and doing just about whatever she wanted to on the court, she electrified audiences. Maybe the best pure athlete in red and black at the time — Brianne King might have an argument — Ellsworth-Bagby helped spark a true golden age of Wolf female athletics.
During her time at CHS, she and her teammates, like the wham-bam volleyball duo of Amy and Sarah Mouw, went to state in all three of her sports (basketball, softball, volleyball), placing third in state in their first year as a fastpitch softball squad and making it to the state semifinals in hoops.
It was a time when the Wolves expected to win and didn’t back down from anyone. And why not? They were all superheroes!
“One of the best memories about basketball was getting to play with my three best friends — Brianne King, Tracy Taylor, and Erica Lamb,” Ellsworth-Bagby said. “We were always doing ridiculous things together, like “forking” teacher’s yards, and calling ourselves superheroes.
“No joke, we had the Underoo’s and everything. I was Batman. Brianne was Flash. Erica was Spiderman, and Tracy was Superman,” she added. “I think we thought that it would make us better athletes or something. We even got our professional basketball picture taken together with the respective outfits!”
A 2002 CHS grad who just returned for her ten-year reunion (“Yikes! I’m old! I hope I am able to remember something good to tell you about the ‘good ol’ days’,” she said with a laugh), Ellsworth-Bagby, like her sister, April, and brothers Mike and Jason, was a star. But she also worked her tail off like few others.
She’d like to be remembered most of all for being “a hardworking athlete that played with all her heart every game and did her very best to practice good sportsmanship. Except for one instance that I can remember in a state basketball tournament game when I got my first technical, and Coach (Willie) Smith proceeded to get one immediately after.
“Needless to say we lost that game.”
Ellsworth-Bagby took a swing at college athletics after her glory days as a Wolf, with a “very long” redshirt year at Pacific Lutheran University (“After a whole year of practicing, working my butt off and watching my team play in the games, I decided I wanted to actually play in a game.”) and a year as a starter at South Puget Sound Community College. After that, real life took her away, as she pursued a career in nursing.
That calling took her to Tucson, where she worked as an ER nurse (and freaked out the world by posting pictures of herself covered in horrifying — but fake — wounds on Facebook), did time as a high school JV basketball coach and eventually moved into being a labor and delivery nurse.
Now back on Whidbey, she currently works as an RN in labor and delivery at Swedish Edmonds, while doing some personal training on the side. Still interested in coaching, she has also thought about returning to school to get her teaching certificate.
An avid rock climber, camper and snowboarder who can still lay down the beat-down on the basketball court, Ellsworth-Bagby devotes a fair amount of her free time to Crossfit training. Much of her current success can be directly related back to the time she has devoted to the sporting life, she said.
“I truly believe being involved in athletics has helped me incredibly, to be successful in my life today,” Ellsworth-Bagby said. “Athletics have taught me not only the importance of physical fitness but how to work hard, set goals and work towards them. It has taught me sportsmanship and how to work together as a team, even with people that you don’t particularly agree with.
“It has also given me great confidence in myself and confidence is key to success in anything you do,” she added.
And if that day comes and Coupeville High School ever decides to put together a Hall of Fame for the great athletes of its past, what would she say in her induction speech?
“Ha ha, this is funny … hmm, well, I guess I would have to say, ‘What a great honor to be thought of as on the same level as so many of these athletes that I have admired and looked up to as a young girl’.”
And then she’d bust out the Underoos one more time.
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