With just two weeks of football remaining in the regular season, optimism remains alive throughout the area as several high school teams compete for league championship honors and playoff positioning. Depending on the outcome, sports seasons can sometimes resemble the 1967 movie starring Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
It’s good when you win, disappointing and bad when you lose, and can become downright ugly when parents and fans start playing the blame game.
Such was the case emanating from the small school, Williams Valley, earlier this month. The Tower City District 11 AA Vikings, a sometimes opponent of District IV teams, were enjoying a 6-1 start to the season before parental complaints and disagreements led to the resignation of third-year coach Stephen Sedesse, who led his team to a 28-6 record and two district championships during his tenure.
As reported by USA Today, Sedesse’s mid-season departure from the team came following the coach’s decision to discipline players on the roster. Turmoil developed after parent complaints, reported conduct issues by players, and disagreement with the school’s administration, which suspended the coach for two games for sitting two players longer than they were previously told.
Sedesse submitted his resignation letter citing parents took issue with his decision to discipline players on his roster for a game against Panther Valley. The letter also claimed he had previously been threatened by parents after the team’s lone loss, was unable to hold players accountable, and even had obscenities hurled at him from the stands.
Sedesse’s resignation letter, obtained by the media, detailed the coach’s actions.
“When I took this role, it was with hopes of changing a culture and helping in the pursuit of building student-athletes. My staff and I built a winning team on the field, but more importantly, a winning team off the field. We completed community service projects and rarely ran into eligibility problems. It was always an emphasis to be disciplined on the field and in the classroom. When you lose the ability to discipline and hold members of your team accountable, the ship will sink.
“As a coach, you see things or hear things at practice that need to be addressed. At the end of the day, the coaches make decisions on who will play and who will not play. When parents take the coaches’ ability to discipline and hold their child accountable, due to threats and defamatory statements, it is impossible to have trust. When parents can approach you at the locker room following a loss and yell obscenities from the stands, and get away with it, it creates a bad environment for the coaches and the kids alike.
“After 28 wins, I never had a parent attack me. After each of the six losses, I had parents threaten my job and livelihood. Each time, nothing was done about it. When you have no support, you can’t make it work.
“We live in a world where parents and children are friends. When a child yells expletives at a coach, the parent deflects the behavior, saying the coach is the problem. When the coach disciplines their child, they get threatened. Parents often make the statement, ‘My kid is a great kid; he wouldn’t act like that.’ I agree to a certain extent; it is out of the ordinary for certain kids to act out of character. However, it’s my job to handle it, so it doesn’t become an everyday occurrence.
“Football is hard, and it’s a team sport. You can’t win with ego; not one player is bigger than the program. If you allow that, you don’t have a program anymore. But add in parent pressure, and in today’s world, the kid gets away with it, the parent gets away with it, and the coaches get left out to dry.”
There are always two sides to a story, and if this were a courtroom, there would be a rebuttal from the other side. What exactly was said to the coach by players, and why administrative support was not forthcoming, is unknown. But, similar to what happened in Williams Valley, it is not isolated. Parents have every right to support their child. It is understood that some parents watching a sporting event have one eye on their child and one eye on the rest of the team. Seeing the entire field is paramount to athletic success.
It is a coach’s responsibility to coach with both eyes and both ears open. When disagreements occur, schools have an established chain of command to handle situations. In our neck of the woods, let’s make sure we don’t have a ‘Williams Valley incident.’
