“The bug never leaves you,” he said, but “Aloha” means goodbye in a literal sense for Jim Bratten.
The longtime figure in Colorado sports has retired as football coach at Class 3A Holy Family in Broomfield, and will call it an administrative and teaching career at the end of the school year, and eventually move to Hawaii.
We should all be so fortunate.
“It has been fun,” said Bratten, who also is the school’s athletic director. “I tell people it’s like never having to go to work. You just go play.”
Bratten, 58, has “played” for nearly four decades in a wonderful life heavy on kids, sports and school with notable stops at Pomona, Standley Lake and Arvada.
He still has the first contract he signed in 1971, for $5,200 a year, at Highland (now Skyview). He bumped it up another $600 by coaching three sports.
“So for the first 20 years as a teacher, I painted houses in the summer,” he said. “You do those things to make it.”
Bratten, a former quarterback at the University of Colorado, certainly made it as a head coach, leading Arvada to the 1984 final and eight years later with Pomona. His Panthers teams were known for their open-minded approach to offense, and Bratten will be recalled for his even demeanor no matter the outcome.
When asked how long it took him to forget a one-point loss to Boulder in a cold, snowy big-school title game in 1992, Bratten replied: “About five minutes.”
Neil H. Devlin, The Denver Post
