THE FRONT ROW with BRUCE BOURQUIN, Oct. 24, 2014

When Coeur d'Alene Charter Academy began fielding its first varsity girls soccer team in 2012, Dave Baxter may not have been the most ideal person the Panthers could have chosen for their first coach in team history.

SHOOT, YOU can ask coach Baxter himself.

"Very candidly, I didn't feel I was qualified to coach a high school soccer team," said Baxter, 49. "So I called Dan Nicklay, the principal at Charter, and declined and gave him three names of the people that I thought might be interested in the job that I thought were good candidates and were people I knew I'd be excited to have my daughter play for. They called those folks and one of them took the job. So that was in January of 2012. The phone rang again at the very end of May and the candidate that they had hired, he had a professional conflict and he wasn't able to fulfill it. So basically it was, 'Mr. Baxter, come coach or this thing isn't going to happen right now.' The funny thing is they offered me the job and Mr. Nicklay, in the interview, I don't think a single time, talked about winning. But he did mention sportsmanship about 15 times."

THE NEWLY hired coach had a few humble beginnings to work with, and it included just getting enough girls to come to tryouts and practices, besides his then-sophomore daughter Katie Baxter at midfielder and forward, in the 2012 preseason was initially challenging.

"We didn't have that much time to work with, because there were three days of school left and the girls had final exams," Dave Baxter said. "On the second day of final exams, we arranged for a meeting after school for all the girls that were interested in playing soccer. And I was standing outside the room and waiting for the girls to come in, I kept poking my head in and there weren't many girls and finally about 10 minutes later, it's after the meeting time and we started with seven girls."

More girls came ... eventually. The coach put on his recruiting shoes and got to work.

"By tryouts, all summer long, we trained and then there were only three or four girls that were run by the captains. By tryouts, we managed to get our numbers up to a whopping 10," Baxter said. "They really wanted to play and it's something that I'll always remember, we were over at Woodland Middle School, which was our home for our first season and the girls were scared and they were worried that they'd made a commitment to something that wasn't going to happen. And here are these 10 sets of eyes that are looking up at me and I told them, 'We're going to make this happen, no matter what I have to do.' I was probably kind of lying a little bit, because I didn't know how we were going to make this happen. I put on my (Alabama football coach) Nick Saban hat and I called some families and gave them the recruiting pitch and by the end of the season, I think we got it up to 17 players. We were excited to get those kids and thank goodness we got those kids, because we've built a strong program and we're going places and it's because those kids who came out back then that were where we are today."

The girls grew up quickly, coming together during a season in which the Panthers finished a respectable 5-4-1 in the Intermountain League and 8-9-1 overall, beating rivals such as Kellogg once and tying Timberlake.

This season, Coeur d'Alene Charter (15-2-1) won the IML with an 8-0 record, falling 1-0 to Timberlake in the district championship to Timberlake but quickly recovering to win 2-1 in a shootout over Fruitland in a state play-in game. This came one season after the Panthers won the league with a 9-0-1 record (14-4-3 overall) and won the consolation championship at state.

Baxter even helped secure the field where the Panthers have played the past two seasons - at Community United Methodist Church, located across the street from Lake City High.

"Woodland was not available last year," Baxter said. "After looking around, we identified CUMC as a space large enough to house a soccer field. An old friend was a member of the congregation so I reached out to him to find out what was possible. It turns out that this idea fit in with the mission of the church to reach out and support the community and thus our home was established."

SOCCER WASN'T even Coeur d'Alene Charter's first idea, but it all worked out, both for the school and for the Baxters.

"They were starting to think they might start a softball team," Baxter said. "There wasn't enough interest in softball, so they figured they'd go with soccer."

Baxter was contacted right after Christmas of 2011. He had been recommended by a parent of a player he had coached in youth soccer.

"I was surprised that they would call me and said I needed to talk to Katie about it," Baxter said. "Kate at the time was in her freshman year at the Charter Academy and she was playing JV for coach Stacey Smith at Lake City and had a good year. Kate really enjoyed playing for Stacey (who is a teacher at Charter)."

Naturally, the decision back then on whether Dave was really going to coach or not was a family decision. Dave, Katie and her mom, Tammy, who works as the vice president of production at Tristan Media, which operates websites for radio stations such as KVNI 1080 in Coeur d'Alene and ESPN 700 in Spokane, weighed in. Dave, who graduated from George Washington University and grew up in Plymouth, N.H., is now self-employed and works for Grassroots Advocacy, which helps affect public policy and supports grassroots efforts around the nation.

Katie, who is now a 17-year-old senior, didn't necessarily mind playing for dear ol' dad, but at first she preferred to keep family and soccer separate.

"So before Mr. Nicklay had called me back, he had talked to Katie and I think maybe exerted a little pressure on her to change her mind to perhaps having her father as the coach," Dave Baxter said. "So we had a long talk about it with my wife and Kate as a player and she'd be switching schools and teams. After a very long conversation, we decided this could be an adventure and we could do it, so we did."

Three seasons later, dad coaching daughter has worked out just fine, as Katie has scored 53 career goals, including 15 this season, including the game's only goal in a 1-0 victory over Sugar-Salem on Thursday in the first round of the state 3A girls soccer tournament at Sunway Soccer Complex in Twin Falls.

"I had him coach me when I was younger and I had two years without him coaching and it was nice to keep home and soccer separate," Katie said. "So I wanted a normal high school experience. But I knew that if he didn't coach, the team wouldn't have happened. It wasn't necessarily that I had a problem with (him coaching me). I was looking for other options (as coaches), but when it came down to it, I was fine with it, because it had worked before when I was younger. I'm glad it did happen and it's made us closer and the team's been quite successful over the past three years and it's been a really good experience for the both of us."

Katie wishes to play intramural soccer after high school and major in accounting in college. She said her first college choice is Clemson, followed by Baylor, then Alabama. Her 20-year-old brother, Stephen Baxter, is currently a sophomore majoring in nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan and is in the United States Air Force.

DAVE BAXTER got into coaching in 2005, coaching his daughter's parks and rec team, then coached for the Coeur d'Alene Sting club before taking the Coeur d'Alene Charter job.

During those youth days, Baxter coached several girls who have played for Cd'A Charter, as well as current Lake City players Meaghan Bare, Maddi Ward and Alissa Jolliff.

So the father-daughter coaching relationship that almost never was has blossomed into a fruitful deal for Charter.

"It's turned out better than I thought it would," Katie said. "I wouldn't change it at all."

Count Dave the Dad in.

"We butted heads when she was about 7 years old," Dave said. "We were not on a good path. Coaching her has forced us to work on our relationship. It's brought us much closer."

Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013 or via e-mail at [email protected]

Lake City boys, Cd'A girls lose in 5A; Charter girls, Timberlake girls triumph in 3A