For the first 12 years of her marriage, her husband was constantly on the go, hitting doubles at ballparks across America and establishing a Hall of Fame resume as the game’s greatest designated hitter.

Holli Martinez will never forget the loving tribute Seattle Mariners fans gave Edgar at the end of the 2004 season. She loves the game of baseball, but with Edgar’s retirement, she now has time to pursue some more of her lifelong dreams.

“When he was in baseball, I felt my job was to hold down the fort so he could focus on baseball,” she said.

On September 25, 2008, Holli and Edgar opened the Martinez Foundation. The foundation aims to reach out to troubled minority students and to assist teachers who are helping children in minority and low-income neighborhoods.

In April, the Martinez Foundation announced the winners of 25 scholarships. Fifteen of the scholarships, five of which went to WSU, will pay $15,000 to minority students interested in attending graduate school for education. The other 10 will pay the full tuition of Latino students seeking undergraduate degrees.

Senior Spanish major Elida Guevara, who helped found the Multi-Cultural Affiliated Student Organization and Ritmo Latino at WSU, said she is thankful for the opportunity the Martinez Foundation is providing her.

“It was really excited when I heard that they were going to help me pay for college,” she said.

Guevera, an Othello native, plans to teach middle school or high school in the Tri-Cities. During the past two summers, she has worked for the WSU GEAR UP program in the Tri-Cities, which is designed to help troubled students graduate.

“We want to make sure our teachers are committed to working in underprivileged situations with the most challenging situations,” Holli said.

Holli, who sang the national anthem three times at Mariners’ games during Edgar’s career, originally attended Seattle Pacific University on a music scholarship. Shortly after meeting Edgar at age 20, she dropped out, citing a lack of confidence in herself and a lack of confidence instilled in her by her professors.

As her oldest son became a teenager, Holli felt a strong responsibility to be a role model for her three children. In 2006 she enrolled at UW-Bothell, eventually earning an interdisciplinary degree in ethics, society and human behavior.

“I couldn’t in good conscience tell them to go do something that I hadn’t done,” she said.

Holli loved the classes so much that she returned to UW-Bothell to pursue a master’s degree in public administration.

“I can now imagine a bigger world than I ever could before,” she said.

Edgar, who attended two years of college in Puerto Rico before jumping into the minor leagues, followed a similar path. In 2008, he completed a nine-month business program at UW in 2008, which Holli described as a mini MBA.

Though Edgar, a 2007 inductee into the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame, has long had a reputation for community involvement, Holli said she and Edgar always wanted their own foundation.

The foundation wanted to focus on education issues and minorities because of the high dropout rates for minority students in the state, Holli said. In Seattle alone, the dropout rate for high school students is 47 percent for Hispanic students and 52 percent for blacks.

“We wanted to wait until we had a pointed, distinct passion,” she said.

When they first began thinking about starting the foundation, Holli said she and Edgar asked administrators at UW and WSU where they could be most effective in reducing dropout rates. Holli said both universities stressed the importance of training teachers to work with troubled and poor children, which disproportionately refers to minorities.

“One of the challenges for teachers is that they don’t get practical experience working with these types of children,” she said.

In the future, the foundation plans to hire guest speakers and educators to help train local teachers to cope with these issues.

“We’re right now in the early stages of writing grants,” she said. “It’s been really fun.” Holli, the foundation’s president, said she does most of the outreach and research for the foundation.

Edgar, the foundation’s CEO, focuses his attention on the costs and looking at the business aspects. Edgar also runs a merchandising company, Branded Solutions, which earned him the first Jackie Robinson Most Valuable Diverse Business Partner Award on April 16 .

Though she said Edgar has not ruled out eventually returning to baseball as a hitting coach, she said Edgar is enjoying being able to spend more time with his family. The family is taking a trip to Spain with their eldest son’s school this summer, when normally Edgar would have been busy with the Mariners.

As for Holli, their new lifestyle is just the way she likes it.

“This is something I go to bed and wake up thinking about,” she said. “I love it. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”