Mentors: Standing on Shoulders

by Karol Crosbie

There’s a particular basketball maneuver that Reggie Minton ’63 used when he coached at Dartmouth College, and later at the Air Force Academy. Its name is “Wooster.”

Larry Shyatt '73 shouts directions to the University of Florida men's basketball team.

The individual attention they give, the strategies they model, and the motivation they inspire make coaches influential in the lives of their players. Many of these players become coaches. And the cycle continues.

Matt Englander ’02, head coach, baseball, Case Western Reserve University: “Coach Pettorini (Wooster’s head baseball coach) was my mentor and always will be. He is famous for his sense of fairness. His best and his worst players—he treats them all the same. Sometimes with Coach P., people mistake his fairness for abrasiveness. I didn’t realize how much he cared until after I graduated.”

Pete Meyer ’87, head coach, baseball, Florida Southern College: “I’ve been fortunate to have four great coaching mentors. From my dad, who was a coach, I learned about how to deal with individual players. I watched Tommy Thomas (head coach at Valdosta State), and learned how to deal with the community. Chuck Anderson (head coach, Florida Southern) modeled organization. And Coach Pettorini—his intensity will always impress me—the way he lived and died for baseball.”

Larry Shyatt ’73, associate head coach, basketball, University of Florida: “The hardest-working people I ever met were coaches. It was easy for me to select this as a profession. At Wooster, Al Van Wie always showed us how to handle winning and losing with class and dignity.”

Expanding the inner circle

The mentoring that women coaches have received has not followed the easier course of their male counterparts. Before 1972, when the passage of Title IX federal legislation required gender equity in educational institutions, there were few varsity women’s sports and even fewer female varsity coaches. Brenda Meese, who began coaching in 1977, represents the first generation of post-Title IX women coaches. “The people who coached me had not played varsity in a collegiate sport,” she says.

But that did not make their mentoring any less valuable. “They were starting from scratch, from the ground up,” says Meese, whose own mentor was Maria Sexton, the College’s professor and head of women’s physical education from 1953-1984. During a 2008 academic leave, Meese will study and document Sexton’s national and international contributions.

Brenda Meese '75 coaches the Scots field hockey team.

While female coaches now have the critical mass necessary for professional success, more momentum is essential before they will have a presence as administrators, says Meese. “At Division I schools, there are more female university presidents than there are female athletic directors.”

The change, she says, will come from mentoring, particularly its final stage. “Mentoring has four stages. The first is, ‘You’d be good at this, why don’t you try it?’ The second is, ‘This is how you do things.’ Third is, ‘We’re equals, but I’m better at this than you are, and you’re better at this than I am—let’s share knowledge.” The final stage is advocacy. ‘I know somebody who would be great for this job.’

“We don’t have enough advocates yet, because we don’t have the critical mass of women who are in that inner circle— the circle that says, ‘I have somebody for you.’

“We like to mentor people who are like ourselves.We’re more comfortable staying within our gender, or race, or socioeconomic group. To expand that inner circle, it takes stepping outside of your comfort zone to mentor people who may not be like you.”