Donald Lee Watson
Coach (1977-1990)
Waubonsee’s first Volleyball Head Coach (1977-1990)
First Softball Coach, led team to 1980 Skyway Conference title
Taught first volleyball class at Waubonsee
USA Volleyball Senior Nationals participant several times
Donald Watson has never been one to shy away from a challenge. In the days when there were very few women’s athletic programs, he helped start two Waubonsee women’s teams from scratch. Considering the obstacles he had to overcome earlier in his life, it came as no surprise that he was more than able to get the job done.
A native of Reading, Ohio, Watson suffered a bout of rheumatic fever at age 7 that kept him from participating in sports until he was in college. However, he was always around the games as a team manager, timekeeper or field maintenance worker. Watson began playing both softball and basketball before getting involved with volleyball through a highly competitive Elgin YMCA league after graduating from Olivet Nazarene University in 1955. Staying involved in athletics, in 1974 Watson started a sports page for the Elburn Herald, covering local teams as a part-time writer.
Not long after that, Watson matriculated to Waubonsee, where he wore a few different hats over the years. He helped establish the volleyball program in 1977 as the first Head Coach, holding those reins for the next 14 years. In more than half of those seasons, his squad finished in the Skyway Conference’s top three. In 1979 Watson helped lay the foundation of another program when it was time to begin a softball team. He spent two seasons in the dugout, highlighted by a Skyway Conference title in 1980. More than a decade later, he stepped in to coach Waubonsee’s softball team again when the program found itself without a coach as the season was about to begin.
Downplaying his role, Watson refers to himself as “more a teacher of skills than a coach.” He began teaching a volleyball class at Waubonsee in the 1980s and ran summer camps for high school players for many years. Watson has also coached club volleyball a majority of the last 20 years. At the age of 50, he began playing on an Illinois team that went on to compete in nine straight Senior Nationals, and this June he will play in the USA Volleyball National Championships in Phoenix, Ariz. He and his late wife, Jacqueline, raised two sons, James and Jay. Watson lives in Maple Park and is currently in his 10th year as Girls’ Varsity Head Volleyball Coach at Hinckley-Big Rock High School, leading them to the “Sweet 16” each of the last two years.