Get to know Jimtown HS football and baseball coach, Elkhart area resident Cory Stoner
ELKHART, Ind. — Cory Stoner grew up participating in sports, but he had a knack for taking games to a whole different level. When playing in the backyard, he would interview himself as a coach. Several years later, those dreams came to fruition when he not only became the Jimtown High School head football coach, he also took on the head coaching mantel for the baseball team.
With a wife and four young kids at home, you can almost imagine the conversation that ensued, but Cory revealed how important it was to have the family on the same page with this decision.
“I knew that if this was going to happen,” Cory said, “this was a ‘we’ thing. We understood we were going into this together. My wife, Richele, who is the greatest wife of all time, does an incredible job of incorporating the things we are doing with the kids. You’ve got to have a great wife in order to be a coach. But you have to have a really great wife to be a coach of two sports.”
Since Cory played both sports in school, it would be easy to have an affinity for one sport over the other, but he insisted he can focus on one sport at a time effectively. “I love both of them, but in order to make it work, you have to feed off the energy of the kids,” he said. “I love coaching and teaching these kids, and the most rewarding thing is seeing them excel beyond the classroom and the athletic field. It takes a village to help raise a kid, but it’s a very rewarding profession. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Trying to win in high school sports is important, but Cory said Jimtown is more about wanting the kids to focus on the GOLD standard motto, where each letter stands for different characteristics. G is Grit, O is Optimism, L is Leadership and D is Discipline. Each week in football they’ll take one of those letters and apply it into the sporting world, and then into the students’ everyday lives. Those are the things he wants the students to win at.
How long Cory can maintain the grind year after year remains to be seen, but he plans on keeping a proper perspective. “You know right away if coaching is meant for you,” he said. “Certain guys who get into coaching think they’re going to love it, and get burned out pretty quickly. If you’re going in it for personal glory, you will get burned out. You have to coach for the love of the kids. When you show up for them after a long workday, you still have to get excited to make these kids better. That’s where the energy and passion has to come from.”
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