Shayne Stedman Character Analysis

Early in my time at Griswold High School, there happened to be a sprinter that competed on the girl's track team. She was an all-around athlete and had the potential to be extremely successful in both the sprinting and jumping events. During her junior year, her performances in both practices and the meets began to decline rapidly. Shayne Stedman, who was the girl’s coach at the time, came to me and voiced his confusion over how to handle this. After determining that there was nothing physically or medically wrong with the girl, we began to seek an alternative solution. Over the next few weeks her performances continued to plummet, and with it, so did her confidence. With about a month to go in the season, she finally informed us that she and

her family had hired a private coach. Apparently, she would come to practice every day at Griswold, and then travel about twenty miles away to work out for her “other coach” for an extra hour and a half. Incredibly, neither she nor the private coach could understand why her performances were dropping like a rock in the ocean. So, why did she feel the need for a private coach? The story we received was that her parents thought she could get a track scholarship to college, and by hiring a private coach, they felt it would maximize her chances for such an event to occur. Luckily, for all concerned, the parents saw the error of their ways and decided that one coach was enough. Ironically, we would find out later that the private coach would blame the Griswold coaches for “overtraining” this girl, and we (and not he) were why her performances failed.
Even at the college level, private coaches can become a nuisance. One local high school runner, who was being coached over the summer by his private coach decided to attend a state college in Connecticut. While there, the training regimen was loosely structured and, as in many college programs, the athletes sometimes did the workouts on their own. For this particular private coach, he decided that he was going to continue directing this runner’s training. When the college coach found out what was going on, the private coach was instructed to stay away from the team. Did he listen? Absolutely not. It got to the point where he became such an irritation to the team, the coaches, and the university that they had to ban this person from stepping foot on the campus. To this day, if he is seen on that campus, he will be immediately arrested for trespassing. Perhaps I’m wrong, but that just doesn’t sound like a normal coaching situation to me, nor one that I would want my son or daughter to be involved in.
In addition to the fact that these types of coaches are primarily concerned with their own self-worth and maintaining it by coaching only good athletes, I’ve often wondered why some high school coaches would even allow one of their athletes to have a private coach and still be a part of their team. Do any of these private coaches produce good runners? Many times, Yes. But, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it’ll quickly disrupt your team’s training plan. While one person will be doing their “personal” workout, and others are off doing another, sooner or later, some members of that team are going to ask the proverbial question, “If that person can have special workouts, why can’t I?” This can only lead to some degree of dissension in that group and in the process negatively affect the team. This is precisely why I’ve always had the following rule about private coaches when it came to my teams. “You can have a private coach whenever you want, you just won’t run for this team, if you do.”