By Garth Shanklin
Sports Editor
All good things must come to an end. Goshen boys’ basketball head coach Scott Wake has been prowling the sidelines for 27 years, the past 16 of which he’s spent at Goshen. At the Southern Buckeye Athletic and Academic Conference’s winter sports banquet on Tuesday, March 7, Wake announced that he was stepping down as the Warriors’ head coach to focus on being the school’s athletic director. According to Wake, the decision is one that has been on his mind for a while.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now,” Wake said. “The group we had this year, with my youngest son being in that group, it’s something that I’ve been kind of thinking about the last two or three years. I wanted to get through this group.”
Wake also serves as the school’s athletic director, a position he said he would have liked to be able to dedicate more time to. Stepping down as the boys’ basketball coach allows him to do that.
“I need to put a little more time into the athletic director position, I haven’t been able to do that as well as I’d like to,” Wake said. “I hadn’t been able to do my basketball job as well as I’d like to, so something had to give.”
The players themselves weren’t taken completely by surprise when he announced his decision, according to Wake.
“It wasn’t a complete shock to them,” “I think that they kind of knew that this may happen. Some of them were kind of upset with it, some of the guys that were coming back from last year were a little upset but I think they understand. This is my 27th year doing it, I’ve been doing this for a while. I think they knew it had to end sometime.”
In those 27 years as head coach, Wake said the groups of players he’s coached provide the most memories.
“Certain groups that you go through that are fun groups to coach, they’re successful but they’re also good kids, good students,” Wake said. “They’re just good people. This group was one of those groups. I’ve had three boys go through, I’ve known a lot of those boys since they were little. They were playing with my own boys when they were in third, fourth grade. I’ve known them for a while. It’s a lot of fun to see 10 years of these kids going up through the program.”
As the athletic director, Wake will be a key part of the search for the next coach.
“That’ll be something that we’ll start here soon,” Wake said. “We need to get that filled and get going so they can get into their spring stuff and start the stuff for the summer. I’ll be the one in charge of filling that position.”
Wake said the school looks for good people who are also good coaches.
“One of the things you look for is someone to step in who is a good person,” Wake said. “They have to lead the program and that’s one of the things we look for in all of our coaches, someone who’s is a good person, a good representative and a good character person. That’s going to be a high priority, along with basketball knowledge and those kind of things.”