A match made in dairy club

Photo by Visual Sports

Purdue alums Dave and Karen Cox (far right) led Plymouth to its first girls basketball championship in March when Leslie Swihart (front row, first player from left) hit a free throw with 3.5 seconds left.

His first coaching assignment was to teach Karen how to show a dairy calf in the Purdue Dairy Show. She earned the champion showman award her senior year showing a heifer calf she named Daisy.

“I had always envied the kids at the county fair,” Karen says. “I wanted to learn how to show a calf.”

It may not have been a state championship, but it was a start.

Dave started buying land while he was still a junior in college, studying animal sciences. His course was clear. He had been raised on a dairy farm near Rochester. Upon graduation, he would return to Indiana’s dairy belt and farm with his brother.

Karen’s future was not so defined. She had gone to Indiana University on a music scholarship. But she soon found she had no interest in becoming a music teacher and returned home to Fort Wayne. After a year at IPFW, Karen enrolled at Purdue to pursue a career in veterinary sciences or animal nutrition.

And that’s when she met Dave. But making a lifelong commitment to him would mean putting her career plans on hold.

“I cried when we first started making plans to get married,” Karen admits, “because it meant giving up some of my dreams. I had things that I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to have a career. But at the same time, I couldn’t imagine living without Dave, either.”

Transition to teaching

Twice a day, 365 days a year, Dave and Karen milked their herd of 150 Holstein cows. No vacations, no days off, no sick days. At least, that’s the way it worked until Cy Deeb, the vo-ag teacher at nearby Rochester High School, had a heart attack during the 1978 school year.

Karen’s brother-in-law, school board member Virgil Biddinger, came to her with a plea.

“We have an opening and we really need help,” he said. “Would you come teach and help us get through the semester?”

“I loved teaching that semester,” says Karen, who once told her father that teaching was the last thing she want to do. But that one semester in the classroom made her think a future in education just might be a pretty good deal.

It made Dave start to think, too. Especially when he saw her first pay stub.

“You mean you can make this much money, keep your clothes clean AND not work 14 hours a day?” he asked.

So she went back to school, earning her teaching degree from IU- South Bend. But it wasn’t until dairy prices bottomed out in 1983 that Dave and Karen could read the handwriting on the barn wall.

“We were working 365 days a year and, financially, things weren’t getting any better,” Karen recalls. “I got very discouraged.”

“You need to get off the farm,” Dave told her.

“I could teach at Triton High School and be at the same school with my daughters,” Karen says, “but they wanted to hire someone who could coach seventh- and eighth-grade girls basketball, too. And I didn’t know anything about basketball.”

But Dave did. Sure, he had been cut from his high school basketball team, but what Hoosier native doesn’t think he’s at least as good as any mid-level college basketball coach?

“Take the job,” Dave told Karen. “I’ll help you coach.”

So Dave adjusted his schedule so he could milk cows at 3 a.m., then hurry off to practice at 6 a.m., before school started.

“I really thought I could do it all — farm, coach and teach,” Dave recalls.

He, like Karen, had been taking classes at IU-South Bend, so he could teach biology and coach at the high school level. Their first two teams only won a half-dozen games between them, but it was enough. He had caught the coaching bug.