McAllen volleyball head coach Paula Dodge announced her retirement Thursday.
Dodge has been head coach for the Bulldogs for the past 25 years, and one year prior as the junior varsity coach.
Dodge, from R Wing, Minnesota, has compiled a career record of 584-280 (.676). She most recently directed her team to the UIL Sweet 16 in each of the past two years.
”I just think it’s time to move forward and do some things with family and relax a little bit,” Dodge said. “I love volleyball and what I do and have done for the past 37 years and am going to miss it immensely. But it’s time for a new chapter and time to relax a little bit. How long that will last? I don’t know.”
She was elected into the Rio Grande Valley Sports Hall of Fame in 2020 and will be inducted later this year.
Dodge moved to Brownsville in 1984, driving 24 hours alongside her brother from Minnesota for her first job as a 23-year-old.
“It was 108 degrees that first week (of work),” Dodge said to The Monitor after being named The Monitor’s All-Area Volleyball Coach of the Year, a honor she also garnered in 2016. “That heat was hard for me to adjust to that first year.”
Dodge was a three-year letterman in three sports in high school before graduating in 1980. She played collegiate basketball at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, where she was a member of the 1981 AIAW Division III national champion team. She earned her bachelor’s degree from UWL in 1984 and moved to the Valley, according to the RGV Sports Hall of Fame website.
She began her coaching career at Brownsville Hanna, as the varsity track coach and assistant volleyball coach at Hanna High School from 1985 to 1993, coaching a state silver medalist.
Her Bulldog teams have won five district championships and have advanced to the state playoffs 18 times – reaching the regional tournament six times.
”The McAllen school district has been blessed to have a person like her working with our kids,” McAllen School District athletic director Paula Gonzalez said. “She has had such a great impact on so many kids and the sports. Like always, she had her athletes first on the list and she wanted them all to hear it from her first.
”She is something special for sure.“
She will continue teaching but will step down at the end of the semester, according to school officials
“Most of my family is back in Minnesota so I’ll have the freedom to travel when and a where I want,” she said. “People had been asking me for the past five to 10 years about retiring and I would say soon but I didn’t really start thinking about it and then thought I would wait until I’m 60 well I’m 59 1/2 and that seemed good, so I rounded up.”