WHERE ARE THEY NOW : Ex-Dominguez Hills Athletic Director Still Remembers ‘Down There’

More than a year later, Sue Carberry still finds it difficult to forget.

The former Cal State Dominguez Hills athletic director, who quit abruptly to teach in a small Mendocino County town, still refers to her former employers as “we” and, when she hears about the issues that affect the Carson campus 700 miles to the south, catches herself reflecting on them.

Tiny Laytonville, a town three hours north of San Francisco on U.S. 101, couldn’t be much farther removed from the hustle and bustle of the big time--what Carberry terms “down there” in the urban trenches. The nearest population center in those parts, Willits, has just 4,000 residents.

There’s an easiness in her new way of life that Carberry finds refreshing. A year ago she dealt with athletic eligibility and financial restraint. Today she raises rabbits on a 40-acre plot and watches her garden grow.

Shaking urban habits, however, is a slow process.

“I still read the sports pages first,” she said by telephone. “That is, when I can get a newspaper.”

Originally from Illinois, Carberry came to Dominguez Hills from an administrative job at Cal State Long Beach.

She coached softball for a while, then assumed the athletic directorship six years ago, at a crucial time in the school’s history, combining both the men’s and women’s programs under a single administrator. She is credited with laying the groundwork at a small-thinking, former NAIA program that, with a credible fund-raising effort, has the ability to obtain star status on the competitive NCAA Division II level.

She gained the respect of many of the athletic directors in the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. for her ability to recognize problem areas and deal with them before they got out of hand.

Early in her five-year term, Dominguez Hills dropped men’s and women’s cross-country, track and tennis because of financial constraints, but Carberry had the moxie to add women’s soccer. Within three years the program was ranked third in the nation among both Division I and II schools.

The move to soccer showed her foresight, according to current Athletic Director Dan Guerrero.

“Sue was the roll-up-your-sleeves kind of person which you have to be at Cal State Dominguez Hills,” he said.

Carberry often handled some of the minute problems of her job by making do. When the athletic department was consolidated under one roof in a tiny building intended to be a locker room, her staff members quickly ran out of space.

Not to worry, she told them. Carberry converted the lone shower to a filing cabinet and the adjacent toilet to a book stand. To this day, those quarters are still a storage facility for the athletic administration.

Early in her tenure, Carberry hired Guerrero as her assistant. He credits her with helping him grow into an eventual candidate for her job by letting him take important roles on committees affecting athletics.

But as time went on, Carberry discovered something was missing in her life.

“You see people like me in all kinds of work,” she said. “Lots of them plod through their jobs, unhappy. Something is missing. Perhaps they aren’t even doing a good job.”

Quietly, Carberry had burned out. She says she’s not sure of the main cause. She prefers to say it was a combination of smog, traffic and being out of the classroom, stuck behind a desk.

In January of 1988 she announced that she had accepted a job in a six-school unified district in Willits and purchased a farm about 30 miles to the north.

“Everyone questioned why I was doing this,” she said. “They thought I was a Looney Tune, that I needed help.”

Residents of Laytonville thought much the same. Locals have seen big-city bailouts come and go before.

“There are people that have been here 20 years that are still considered newcomers,” she said. “Of the real locals, there is a sense of snobbery, a kind of ‘what are you doing here?’ attitude about them.”

Carberry hoped to teach physical education when she arrived, but spent most of the year in charge of detention classes at a middle school. But she did coach the fifth, sixth and seventh grade track team, a job she liked.

“I wanted to get back to the student level,” she said. “In administration on the college level you are as far from the students as you can be.”

Small-town perspectives are reflected in athletes, she said.

“San Francisco is three hours away. They don’t see big time athletics much here. So they think the efforts they give are the best. Our best here just won’t do against teams from Southern California. They think they are better than they really are.”

Perhaps they are fortunate not to know what they are missing. Carberry has a 62-mile round trip to work now. It takes 50 minutes to get there.

“In L. A. it took me that long to go nine miles to work,” she said.

The western slopes of the Coastal Ranges received 20 inches of snow last winter. For the first time in her life, Carberry had to put snow chains on her tires.

“I learned what black ice was, too,” she said. “I had heard stories about it. They say we don’t get snow here, but 20 inches is a lot.”

What will the future hold? One gets the impression that Laytonville isn’t the last stop.

“We’ll see what happens,” she said. “There are a lot of possibilities. They don’t move really quickly here, but I would like to get into the high school.

“I don’t regret my move here. But it was a gamble at the time. I thought it was the right thing to do. How do you know unless you try it?”

Carberry visited Los Angeles a month ago.

“I thought it would be different than when I lived there,” she said. “It wasn’t difficult to leave.”