Diane Boettcher addresses the
crowd during the 2014 Scholar-Athlete Induction Ceremony on May 24,
2014. (Photo by Sarah Crosby/Bates College)
While working at Bates, Diane learned that a selling point for a
liberal arts education is that the average person will have 14 jobs
and three careers in a lifetime, and that Bates College teaches
students how to learn. Now 11 jobs later and on her
third career, Diane returns to her first job to join in the
Scholar-Athlete Society celebration and in honoring an influential
colleague.
Diane was the first Bates coach to be named a national coach of
the year. While she had some other firsts in her soccer coaching
career, where she was a first she was determined not to be an only.
Fifteen of her players or assistant coaches followed her to
become collegiate head coaches themselves. That statistic is one of
only two that she recalls. The other is that no player ever
had a knee blowout during her 25-year career of coaching women.
At Bates, Diane helped found the Bates College All-Sports Camp,
served as the pool director, assisted with basketball and softball,
was president of the New England Women’s Intercollegiate
Soccer Association and was appointed to the NCAA Soccer Rules
Committee. She went on to Davidson College to initiate their
Division I soccer program and to hand out their first athletic
scholarship to a female athlete. Later, while at the
University of Maine, she headed the state’s soccer Olympic
Development Program and served as State Director of Coaching.
Finally, at Middlebury College her team won the first
women’s soccer NESCAC championship and the last game she
coached was the NESCAC softball championship final.
Her second career was teaching and coaching in Maine’s
public schools and it was while driving to work one morning that
Diane heard an advertisement, “Do you balance your checkbook?
Do you do your own taxes? Become a CPA!” As
easy as that, she had a third career.
Diane is now both a California Certified Public Accountant and a
Chartered Global Management Accountant with a master’s degree
in taxation. Her specialty is insurance taxation and she
maintains compliance for the sixteen companies within Vision
Service Plan that serve the 50 states, Canada and the United
Kingdom, enabling independent doctors to provide world class vision
care to their patients.
