Bolitho played as a teenager of Pacific Coast Soccer League side Victoria O'Keefe S.C. before joining the soccer team of the London Boxing Club in Victoria, for whom he won a Canadian Club Championship national title in 1975.
He began as a starter that season, but soon moved to the substitutes bench before being traded to the Tampa Bay Rowdies.
[1] Bolitho was on the Canadian squad at the 1975 Pan American Games[2] and was a member of the Olympic team at the 1976 Summer Olympics, playing against the Soviet Union in Montreal and North Korea in Toronto.
He played a defensive midfield role in the early days of his first class career before settling down at right back.
Bolitho scored an impressive equalizing goal against the United States in Vancouver in 1976 in a World Cup qualifier and scored again later that year in a 3–0 win over the U.S. in a playoff in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which allowed Canada to advance to the final round in 1978 World Cup qualifying.