SEAWOLF ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Ashley Bates

Sport: Volleyball, 2008-09
Hometown: Peoria, Arizona (Mountain Ridge HS/Glendale College)

EDUCATION
B.S., Accounting, UAA, 2011
M.S., Accounting, Grand Canyon University, 2018
Certified Nutrition Consultant, Bauman College, 2020
Certified Functional Strength Coach

THEN: 
*Two-year starting middle blocker on Coach Chris Green’s first two UAA teams
*Posted career totals of 145 kills on .170 hitting and 155 total blocks
*Helped Seawolves to a 23-8 record,  their first GNAC title, and an NCAA Tournament bid as a senior
*Had four kills and a career-high seven blocks to help UAA to its first-ever NCAA Tourney win, beating Hawaii Hilo in 2009

NOW:
*Small business owner since 2015
*Co-founder of Superhero Coalition, with former UAA basketball standout Alysa Horn
*Began Ashley B. Bates Holistic Health sports nutrition and female sports performance training in 2019
*Main accountant for The Other Tax Office from 2015-21

The volleyball program was coming off some tough seasons when Coach Green took over. What interested you in coming to Alaska?
“It’s funny, when I came to Alaska people warned me that the volleyball program wasn’t very good. (UAA went 17-58 in the three seasons prior to Chris Green’s arrival.) And I actually came up here to play for the previous coach, and I didn’t care because I’d been coming up here since I was nine years old and I fell in love with Alaska. I have family here – aunts, uncles and cousins – and I kept coming up every summer and thinking ‘I want to live up here.’ And then I was offered a full-ride scholarship at UAA, and it didn’t matter to me whether they were good or not – I just wanted to play.”

So you kind of lucked into having Coach Green as your coach? What were your first impressions of him?
“Yeah, I never even met the previous coach. We’d emailed and talked on the phone a little bit. I think about a month before I moved up here, in December 2007, I got the news that old coach is gone and Chris Green is coming.’ I really don’t remember my first impression, but I will say he was one of my favorite coaches, along with my community college coach, Lisa Stuck.”

Your two seasons were key to setting the tone for what has become an elite program. What memories do you have of the way the team progressed and improved during those years?
“It was a very different team my junior year compared to my senior year, but both teams were awesome. I feel like we all respected each other. There wasn’t much drama like the usual on female teams, especially volleyball teams, that I’d had experience with. We all wanted to win. We all wanted the same thing. But I think we had that extra level – that extra edge – especially with Coach Green as our coach. (Because of that) we knew what it took to win, to succeed, to do what we wanted to do. We had to work extra hard because we weren’t great at everything – all teams have their quirks – but I feel like we all came together at the right times to succeed in whatever we were doing. Whether it was at practice or in a match or even off the court, I think we gelled very well together. And when I compared that to what I went through before coming to UAA … I mean, the team dynamics at my community college weren’t great. It wasn’t healthy, and full of drama. And the same thing in high school. So the last two years of my collegiate volleyball career were amazing because of the players. And I want to highlight (current UAA assistant coach) Stacie Meisner especially. She was always a leader. Whether we were doing well or not, she always had something motivating to say. I remember this with a couple tournaments that we struggled, and she would bring the team together and say some very powerful stuff that would help us bounce back.”

Is it a special point of pride for you to see how the program has continued to be successful?
“Absolutely. I look and see where they’re going and how good they’ve been, and I think to myself, ‘OK, I played for Coach Green. I played for that team.’ So I don’t brag about it, but I am definitely proud of that, in helping set that tone from when Coach Green came in to change the volleyball program.”

How did the accounting program at UAA prepare you for your professional life, and were there any specific professors who mentored you or made a major impact?
“UAA has a great accounting program and business department in general. I didn’t fully utilize it, though. I know they had the accounting club and job fairs going on, but I never took advantage of those because I was so engaged in volleyball. I mean, getting good grades – A’s and B’s – that was my goal, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with accounting. I didn’t know if I wanted to go the CPA route or another direction. But going through UAA’s program taught me that I didn’t want to go straight into accounting, because I wanted to do more things surrounding fitness after graduation. And then some professors really kept me engaged. Lynn Koshiyama was amazing. I loved her. She was my accounting 101 and 102 instructor. D.J. Kilpatrick, she was tough as nails. I know a lot of students didn’t like her, but I personally liked her because she didn’t take any crap. And she was very smart – I learned a lot from her. And then Rudy Fernandez, my income tax instructor. I think he really appreciated student-athletes and understood what our schedules were like. I had his class during the season so there were a lot of classes I missed, but he was easy to work with. Those are the three professors who I really remember admiring and looking up to.”

You’ve been able to combine two vastly different subjects – accounting and fitness – to create your business. Did you always see them fitting together in your future?
“They are two very separate things. I tried corporate America, and I got my masters in accounting at Grand Canyon University thinking that I was going to get the CPA title and maybe start my own firm. But after I went to corporate America, I also found myself doing other things. I trained the volleyball team and the women’s basketball teams at UAA for a couple semesters, and I was loving that. I was competing in CrossFit Alaska and trying to get more involved in the training and fitness world, and still being involved in athletics, but it didn’t pay well. So I thought, ‘You know what? I need to get serious with accounting.’ I actually moved back to Arizona for two and a half years, got my masters, and worked with my mom in the family business. So I got a lot more experience with taxes and accounting and I thought, ‘OK, you can do this.’ At that point, I moved back here and worked remotely for her for three years.

“And last year I decided, ‘I don’t want to do this after all.’ I love accounting – the critical thinking of it and numbers – and I enjoy working with clients. But my passion is nutrition. Hands down, I wanted to dive into nutrition and do something with that knowledge. And my other passion is fitness. So I was thought, ‘I need to get out of the accounting world. I’m not happy sitting in front of a computer eight to 12 hours a day.’  That's when I started my own business, Ashley B. Bates Holistic Health. My niche was female athletes. I wanted to guide female athletes, and not just train them, but teach them that it doesn’t take just practicing a sport to be a successful athlete. I want to teach the other modalities like nutrition and hydration and their menstrual cycle and digestion and all of that.

“So the accounting and the fitness stuff is very separate, but the cool thing is that I can do all this (payroll, taxes, etc.) on my own. I don’t have to hire an accountant or a tax preparer and spend all that money. And I can do it out of my own home. So that's a huge plus – how I started out with accounting and then wound up chasing my passion.”

Tell us about your fitness coaching business. How did it start, how many clients do you work with, and how has it evolved so far?
“I ran into Alysa Horn, who played basketball at UAA (2008-13) around the same time I was there, and I realized that she’s doing the same thing that I’m doing. She has a garage gym, is training kids. So we met up and had this really long coffee date and we just spilled everything that for the last 10 years had been going on in our lives. It turns out we had the same passions. We wanted to reach out to so many athletes in Alaska, so we decided to join forces and created Superhero Coalition. Now we’re reaching out to more athletes – male, female, middle school, high school, alumni, college athletes. But we’re also reaching out to ‘career’ athletes, like cops, firefighters and military. In Alaska we also have a ton of outdoor enthusiasts who are training for hunts or marathons or mountain runs. So we want to bring all of these athletes together in a sense. We call it Superhero Coalition because we see athletes as superheroes. They all have uncommon mindsets. They are training super hard for whatever it is – their sport, their career, their life. We want to bring all these people together at this location that we will have soon, and we have been busting our butts since October of last year to get this thing going.

“We’re looking for a small location to start and then build out of it in the next five to seven years. Our grand vision is a larger facility with two full-sized basketball courts. We want a café area. We want a conference room for our workshops where we teach the modalities – like mindset, nutrition, hydration, all of that. Obviously a strength and conditioning portion, and a homework area for the kids. There are a lot of moving parts. And we don’t just want to reach out to Anchorage and the Valley. We want to reach out to rural communities. There are a lot of really good athletes out there who don’t have these training opportunities, so we want to somehow travel to them – maybe in the beginning – but then once we get our own facility, we may have dorm rooms where they can stay. Then they don’t have to pay a fortune for a hotel room, and we can have a three- or four-day basketball or volleyball training event, with those rural teams coming to us.”

How did playing for Coach Green sharpen that athletic mindset you talk about, and how did recovering from your own injuries affect how you approach training your clients?
“Coaches definitely shape athletes. It's possible that if I didn’t have Coach Green, maybe I would’ve ended up somewhere else. Maybe I would have had a different mentality than what I have now. Having such a strong and supportive coach like Coach Green, it definitely feeds into my adult life – my mental strength.

“I had back surgery back in 2013 and that was just me being stupid. I didn’t listen to my body and didn’t listen to the pain. I was doing CrossFit and still having that athlete mentality of ‘work through the pain.’ And you wonder and worry, ‘Is it bad enough that I need to sit out, or can I work through it?’ That’s when I really screwed up my back. Alysa had the same kind of back problems too, and therefore we tell our stories all the time and teach our clients, ‘Hey, that’s why you need to use your glutes, you need to use your core – instead of your lower back, like we did when we were playing.’ Because here we are, in our 30s, dealing with this issue. So all of the bad things that we’ve experienced, this is what we tell our athletes, because you don’t want to get back surgery.”   

Being originally from Phoenix, what is it about Anchorage and Alaska that has inspired you to stay and make your life here?
“When I was nine, I came up here to visit family, every summer or every other summer. We’d go fishing, and I just fell in love with it. I love the mountains, the outdoors, hiking. I’m trying really hard to get into hunting. My boyfriend, Brad Whitten, who I’ve been with for over 12 years, he’s a really big moose hunter. He’s been hunting his whole life really, and I’m trying to get involved more. It’s kind of bittersweet because he is old-school and hard as nails, so I’m trying to get into it slowly. I can’t keep up with that guy. I always loved camping growing up in Arizona, which is way different from here, obviously, but really I’ve just always loved the outdoors.”