The greatest Santa Fe athlete in the past 175 years? It could be Carla Garrett

Apr. 7—On what was a picture-perfect Sunday afternoon in early March, a living legend whose name will forever reverberate in Northern New Mexico's sports echo chamber found herself doing a little channel surfing when she happened upon a women's college basketball game.

For a few minutes, the contest came to a complete halt as a scuffle broke out between South Carolina and LSU, stirring fans in the sold-out arena into a frenzy and launching a few days' worth of media coverage extolling the good and bad of everything unfolding before a national TV audience.

The moment caught Carla Garrett's complete attention. As a kid growing up in Santa Fe, she excelled largely without anyone watching. As a budding superstar in college in the '80s, she competed when women's sports was still more of a curiosity than the mainstream media monster it's becoming.

"That's the thing I really missed out on, you know? The fanfare," she said with a heavy sigh. "I was born 25 years too early. I played most of the time in empty gyms or with just a few people watching. Everything is so different now. People really pay attention now."

These days, Garrett, 56, is the strength and conditioning coach at Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson, Ariz. Before that, she was a multisport star at Santa Fe High, a 10-time All-American in track and field at the University of Arizona and a member of Team USA in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

She's arguably the greatest athlete the City Different has ever produced, and certainly a staple of The New Mexican's sports pages for several years as girls' high school athletics — a largely foreign concept only a couple of decades before — began to take root in the 1970s and '80s.

If the legendary faces of Santa Fe's greats were etched into the Sangre de Cristos, Garrett and basketball legend Toby Roybal would be front and center.

The mere suggestion makes Garrett laugh.

"I've never really thought of it that way but, you know, like anyone who grew up in a place and then moved somewhere else to start a new life, I remember my time in Santa Fe with nothing but great memories," she said. "It's where it all started."

Specifically, the neighborhood around Kearny Elementary. Garrett was an only child to a single parent. She and her mom, Suzan Rutherford, lived in a small house within walking distance of the school and the few parks that attracted Garrett like a moth to a flame.

It was at those parks where Garrett's incredible athletics journey was launched. Long before she pulled on a Santa Fe High uniform, she developed a reputation as one of the city's best — and toughest — athletes.

"You can't be a girl if you want to play with boys," she said. "My mom worked a lot, so I'd spend days hitting a tennis ball against the garage or going to the park to play basketball or football with the boys. I'm telling you, if they let you in, they don't let you play like a girl. That, alone, made me tough all through elementary and middle school. The only time I played with girls was the team setting in high school or whatever."

Garrett has never had a relationship with her father. Carl Garrett was a star running back at New Mexico Highlands in the 1960s and spent nine years in the NFL with the Patriots, Bears, Jets and Raiders.

"He missed out on one heckuva life," Carla Garrett said.

Among Rutherford's gifts was the ability to see in her daughter things Carla Garrett could not. When Carla was 3 years old, her grandmother bought her a basketball. Within months, the kid had mastered dribbling and was using every target imaginable as a basket.

By elementary school, she was entering into the old punt, pass and kick competitions for football. She was playing soccer, tennis, volleyball, doing free throw competitions, and, of course, dominating in track and field.

Rutherford spent her days working for state government. Pretty much everything else — including considerable financial resources and hard-earned time off in the summers — were spent traveling around the country to showcase camps and events. They visited Penn State, Indiana and schools in California, stopping at as many places as they could.

"She basically showed me off like a show pony, and I got the looks of a couple coaches from here and there," Garrett said with a laugh. "All of a sudden, word got out, and it kind of blew up before I even got to high school. My mom, she always saw my future better than I did. I thought it was me just being good at sports, but she always saw the potential."

Garrett's sturdy and muscular frame made her a perfect thrower in the shot put and discus. By age 10, she was just a few inches short of a U.S. record for her age group. By middle school, she was already drawing attention from college coaches. By high school, she was regarded as the best athlete in town, gender be damned.

The entire time, her dream was to play basketball. It was the one thing that came the most naturally.

"I always felt I was a better at it than I was at track, but the teams I played on in high school were never all that good, and our games, yeah, no one would really ever go," Garrett said.

By her senior year at Santa Fe High, Garrett had narrowed her college choices to Florida, Arizona, Arizona State and Brigham Young. She was all but signed, sealed and delivered to become a Gator.

Enter Meg Stone. A 1984 Olympian in the discus, she went on to become the first woman to serve as the strength and conditioning coach for an NCAA Division I football program. She also played a huge role in getting Garrett to Tucson.

"Every recruiter told me I'd be a great addition to their program, this and that," Garrett said. "But Meg laid it all out for me. She said, 'Listen, I think you can be an All-American your first year, top-three your second year, win a national championship your junior year and then come back and repeat as a senior.' For me, to talk to me about winning, it was right up my alley."

Garrett's final numbers as a Wildcat dwarfed that initial projection. She was a three-time national champ and was later inducted into the university's sports hall of fame — one of five such inductions she's gone through, including New Mexico's state hall of fame.

"I've been through so many of them I have my speech memorized," she joked.

Stone's influence on Garrett is profound. Garrett was only 16 when she graduated from Santa Fe High. At 5-foot-9 and roughly 235 pounds when she left her hometown, she said she spent her entire freshman year at Arizona being "a 17-year-old girl."

"I'd never really had a coach growing up; I kind of did most things by myself," Garrett said. "I had to go to Arizona to learn how to focus on one thing and sort of master that craft. That meant everything from going to class to getting up and doing specific workouts."

Garrett threw the shot and discus at Arizona, but her final year or two saw her narrow that scope more toward the discus and weightlifting. She began to dabble in the international scene as her time as a Wildcat came to a close. She participated in the World University Games in 1991 and 1993 and was in line for a spot on Team USA for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

"The only way I can describe my experience at the Olympic trials is if you had a lottery ticket and as you were scratching the numbers off you realized you were winning," Garrett said. "I was in sixth place, and I was the last thrower. I knew third [place] got you on the team, and the moment I threw [the discus] I knew it was happening. It was kind of like this out-of-body experience. The only thing I focused on was my mom and my coach in the stands holding hands and cheering for me."

Garrett was on top of the world, but only then was she able to get the perspective her mom did so many years before. At her highest point, Garrett finally had the ability to see into the future like Rutherford did way back when.

Garrett had been invited to a meet in Modesto, Calif., after her second foray at the World University Games. That same day, Arizona's softball team was playing against UCLA.

Garrett's mind drifted.

"I knew right there on the plane it was probably going to be my last competition," she said. "I wanted to be at the game with my friends more than I wanted to be at this exclusive invitation-only event for the top throwers in the country. I remember it to a T. I knew my life was changing. I was shifting into weightlifting and becoming a strength coach. It was clear as day."

Garrett followed Stone's lead, offering her services to Arizona while competing in weightlifting events around the world. Eventually she settled into the teaching aspect of things and has never looked back.

She even had a brief stint working as the strength coach at the University of New Mexico. She left Albuquerque in 2018 to move back to Tucson and start her current role at Salpointe Catholic.

She even had Rutherford move to Arizona with her, leaving behind a life in Santa Fe that many still remember with incredible fondness. The mere mention of "Carla Garrett" elicits stories from the people who've been around long enough to have seen her.

As the generations pass and the memories fade into stories from the ol' timers, Garrett's legacy remains alive in ways that almost seem mythic. She's often described as a larger-than-life figure, one who bulldozed her way onto athletic fields and left onlookers amazed.

Like most fables, some details are embellished while most are simply lost to the yellowing pages of time.

It all makes Garrett laugh.

"I don't think it was quite like that — me being this world class athlete, but it's funny to hear those stories," she said. "I was just a kid of a single mom and a grandmother. I grew up in a place where the boys treated me like one of their own, in a place where my mom always believed in me. That's why Santa Fe will always be this special place for me. Where I am now, it all started there."