Coach Sheldon Webster—the man, the myth, the legend. He is an icon to many of his cross-country team’s runners and is in the Missouri Coach Hall of Fame.
Webster started his running career at McCluer North High School where he graduated in 1978. His older brother got interested in running and when Webster was in high school he tried it out and got hooked.
“I have a love for the sport. I like putting the pieces together,” Webster said, who serves as an assistant coach for the cross country team. “I like guiding other people to success and it evolved into something that fits my personality.”
He loves trying different things and seeing the kids grow. He continues to grow as a coach throughout the years but Webster explains “I don’t think I became a good coach, a really good coach, until I realized I was working with kids and kids don’t think the same way as adults,” Webster said. He really shows that he cares about his students and wants to get to know them on a personal level to try anything he can to help them succeed.
“If people see me from a distance, they don’t get it, because I’m always working so if I’m standing there in the middle of the field with a glare on my face. I’m not angry. I’m studying, I’m thinking, I’m figuring out the next move,” Webster said.
It shows you don’t know him well enough when you just think he’s a grumpy old man, but Webster is a coach who knows how to get work done and is always real and straight up with his students.
“Coach Webster does not sugarcoat anything. He tells it as it is, which is good. I think it’s important for a coach to be honest with the athletes and sometimes coach Webster is brutally honest, but he knows when kids need to hear something other than the truth,” head cross country and track coach Toby Glavin said.
Webster has a reputation for being a very serious and intimidating person.
“He was actually terrifying on the first day of practice. I didn’t think I would make it out of practice,” Bella Navarro-Sánchez (10) said.
All of the kids on the cross country team, especially the older kids, know that Webster is very intimidating on the outside, but deep down on a personal level, Webster is a coach who loves and cares about his students. Trying everything he can to help his runners do the best they can.
“He kind of pushes me and has such an impact on my running and has helped me so much throughout the years,” Zachary Waltz (12) said.
“It doesn’t come out sometimes this way, but he cares so much about kids and the kids that he works with and I think a lot of the times kids don’t realize that, because ‘he’s yelling at me.’ He’s just coaching, but he loves his students and wants them to be successful,” Glavin said.
Webster has worked with many coaches throughout the years of his career, but his biggest mentor is a coach named Rod Staggs who was the first coach he worked for as an assistant coach.
“I really gained an appreciation for relationships and he was good at making those relationships just being able to see all the pieces fall into place and his organization and the way he anticipated changes that he might have to make so his style,” said Webster.
You can tell where some of his coaching styles come from.
“He’s old school and there’s just not a lot of people that are still coaching that have been doing it as long as he has, and we need that,” Glavin said.
Webster has his own unique style of coaching that is very different from other coaches, but it pays off. You can tell that Webster has been more than a coach to his runners.
He’s been a mentor, an inspiration, a leader and an all-around dedicated friend. One they will hopefully remember and continue to learn from.
