MCCLAVE — His passion to win permeated this town. Coach Dick Peecher took the girls of tiny McClave High School and built a basketball dynasty, winning four Class 1A state titles during the past seven seasons, including three in a row, part of the longest winning streak in state history.
Around here, where roads are paved in dust, rodeo is a verb and phone numbers need just seven digits, the southeastern Colorado town proudly celebrated its girls, filling gyms and talking Cardinals basketball like Denverites talk Broncos football.
But to those in this tight-knit community, Peecher was known not just for molding winners but for how he did so, with an abrasive style and volcanic temper.
And last season, the lava spewed.
“He’s so competitive — oh, my gosh, he’s competitive. . . . In the locker room, if (our team) played bad, he’ll get up in the girls’ faces,” said Karlee Stuart, a McClave senior-to-be who has played for Peecher since fifth grade. “The years before, of course he yelled, but this (past) year, he just overdid it.
“Parents from other teams felt sorry for us because of the way he was acting. There was just so much stress between the coaches and the players and the parents. You knew it was coming.”
And, on a June evening this summer, the school board held a vote. Word soon flickered across town like a lightning bug. After 10 seasons as head coach, and just 23 losses, Peecher was fired by a 4-1 vote of the school board.
This is a story about a wildly successful coach whose method to his madness became, in the end, too maddening. It is a story about what is acceptable behavior for a high school coach. It’s a story about how one man divided a town — some parents and players loved the demanding way Peecher coached ’em up; other parents feared for the safety of their daughters. Finally, it’s a story about how a coach’s personal life can splash onto his relationship with his players in a small town.
“We had a lot of success — four championships and went to state every year but once, but I’m kind of a dinosaur in the way that I’m an emotional-type coach,” said the 63-year-old Peecher. “I’m very intense. And that always turns a few people off. . . . It’s like I would tell the girls. I was very honest with them, very point-blank. I said, ‘People see me as an (expletive). They see me screaming at you and yelling. All I want is the best from you. I want you to be the best that you can be.’ But I can definitely see how my ways would rub people the wrong way.”
Good intentions
Raised by a single mother, Shelby Canfield gravitated toward the only man in her life, the enigmatic coach who seemed to stir the town with his winning.
In McClave, roughly 200 miles southeast of Denver, there are only a couple dozen students in each grade, so Peecher coached basically every girl in town wearing high-tops. Canfield first met Peecher in elementary school. According to her mother, “She idolized this man.”
Last winter, at an R.L. Ballard Tournament game, the McClave varsity had a meltdown — and at halftime, so did its coach. Peecher berated his girls with insults. He kicked equipment and, amid the chaos, accidentally hit the junior Canfield with a water bottle.
“He told me he was sorry he lost it and would apologize to (my daughter),” said Shelby’s mother, Marty Canfield. “And he never did.”
Peecher is Shelby Canfield’s godfather. Back in junior high, she hand-picked him for her baptism.
He was a complicated coach, to be sure, passionate about getting the best out of his girls but in doing so at times revealing his worst instincts. But parents put all their eggs in Peecher’s basket, hoping he wouldn’t crack.
“Sometimes (his) emotions might get the best of him, but his intentions are to draw the best out of the girls,” said John Navarrette, whose daughter, Melissa, plays for McClave.
In this town where the population numbers in the hundreds, everybody seemingly has a Peecher story. Some detail his eruptions, others his errors, but all tie into what Faith Stuart, Karlee’s mother, said: “With his competitiveness, I think he gets blinded.”
Take, for instance, the 48-18 loss to rival Kim High last winter. In the postgame locker room, the players told Peecher they would ride home with their parents. But the two junior-high student managers, who had all the team’s equipment in their possession, weren’t in the locker room when Peecher asked about rides. So the junior-high volunteers watched helplessly as the empty team bus rumbled away, a peeved Peecher at the wheel.
And then, on occasion, when the team rode home on the bus, there would be a dozen girls seated behind their coach, and a dark road in front, and Peecher texting while driving.
“He texted a lot,” Karlee Stuart said. “But if he started getting really swervey, to where we’d say, ‘Wow,’ he’d pass the phone back to one of the girls and say, ‘Text this for me.’ “
He’d punch lockers. He’d throw items while on the bench. According to Faith Stuart, he once screamed in the face of an opposing coach at a junior varsity game. Then there was the time at state last spring, when Shelby Canfield fractured her elbow and Peecher watched her writhe from the bench.
Around McClave, Canfield was known for occasional theatrics, but in the final game of the season, Canfield checked in, immediately banged into an opponent and hit the hardwood.
“The ref walked Shelby to the bench,” Marty Canfield said, “and (Peecher) said, ‘My God, you were in there two seconds and you can’t keep your feet?’ And those were the last words he (ever) spoke to her.”
Multiple times during an interview, when asked about mistakes he might have made, Peecher proclaimed: “There are definitely things I wish I had done differently.”
“A winning attitude”
Before the denouement, before splitting a small town like some pungent politician and before all the records and state titles, Dick Peecher was a coach learning how to coach; the simmer before the boil.
He was a 20-something working at Washington High in Kansas City, Kan., when his coaching mentor said something life-changing: “You can’t pattern yourself after somebody; you have to be yourself.”
To this day, Peecher, who led the Cardinals to a state-record 78-game winning streak, holds onto this belief as he would a tree in a typhoon.
“It’s just who I was,” Peecher explained about the methods he used for three decades in these parts — first at Wiley, then at McClave. “I’m a perfectionist. . . . I’ve been that way, really, all my coaching life.”
Why did people like him so? Why did one school board member vote to keep him on? Why did Faith and Karlee Stuart, who shared painful details of Peecher’s demise, also speak so highly of his coaching acumen?
“He had a winning attitude,” said Navarrette, father of Melissa. “Some of his tactics might not be accepted by parents, but I know that my daughter is greatly disappointed by the decision of the school board. She had nothing but good things to say about this man.”
Many past and present McClave parents said that under Peecher, their daughters became stronger young women, not just stronger shooting guards. He always wanted the best for his team. He paid for summer basketball camps when parents couldn’t afford them. He spent money out of his own pocket to fund warm-up suits, travel bags and other accessories for his team. He cared about the girls as if they were his own — three of them, over the years, were.
Word gets around
In McClave, Facebook is irrelevant; everyone is already socially networked.
Take Curtis Sniff, the school board president. He was raised here, like three of the other four board members. Sniff’s niece? She played for McClave’s varsity last season. Sniff’s son? He went to prom with Karlee Stuart. When his son graduated from McClave, Sniff invited the whole dang town over for a barbecue.
But when this Peecher stuff got bad — and according to Karlee Stuart, “his attitude (last season) was the worst it’s ever been” — the community was split about what to do.
Not just the community was divided, but households too.
“Ma might not like it and Dad thinks it’s OK,” Sniff said. “And I could probably tell you which ones are which ways. We’re a small town.”
The pro-Peecher folks wondered whether the problem wasn’t Peecher but instead other parents. Were Mom and Dad becoming too protective? Or, were Peecher’s actions too reprehensible, regardless of his resume?
“He’s been the same forever; none of that’s a whole lot different,” Sniff said. “I think it’s just that people don’t accept it like they used to. It’s probably more of a change of people than a change of him.”
Thing is, the coach was going through a change too.
Getting personal
“I was involved in a divorce (during the season),” Peecher said. “And I think that was part of the reason (for) problems.”
According to numerous townsfolk, Peecher’s divorce — and relationships with new women he was dating — shifted his priorities. Compared with previous seasons, practices were much shorter. His temper was too.
“I told the girls at the beginning of the year what I was going through — I was married to my wife for 31 years,” Peecher said. “It was a tough situation for me.”
The fact that an adult coach shared this personal information with teenage players epitomized the small-town dynamic that led to his dismissal.
The players were well-aware of the whispers surrounding their coach’s personal life, especially when new women popped up in the stands behind the bench throughout the season.
“Some people thought he was being a bad influence on our players (with his girlfriends),” Faith Stuart said. “There were quite a few adults and administration who were seeing that and were like — ‘This is not kosher.’ ”
The marred season crumbled in the nightmarish postseason, with back-to-back losses at state, the last a 42-30 shellacking by Fleming.
“I don’t really know what happened; he kind of just went . . .” Karlee Stuart paused, “different. He didn’t coach. He changed. I don’t think he said a single word to us in the second half of (the last game).”
The revered legend was now just a man who had lost his way.
“I got a little too negative,” Peecher admitted, recalling the two losses.
And by June, he was gone.
“I would say that most of the community was relieved that he was gone; I felt more conflicted,” said Faith Stuart, whose older daughter, Samantha, was part of state championship teams under Peecher.
“You can’t have your kids coached that many years by a man and not have some devotion. But this past year, I was like — ‘Where are you, Dick? Where is the coach?’ “
Going a different direction
The greatest winner this town has ever known is defeated.
“I’m not looking for a job,” Peecher said. “I’m a retired teacher and was hoping to continue coaching for a few more years. Now, I’m going to watch my 9-month-old grandson, and I plan on doing a lot of officiating (of games).”
He grapples with emotions, with demons. Yes, he made some ill-fated mistakes, but wasn’t his passion and fury just all part of who he was? And who was he? Well, just look at the trophy case.
“I made mistakes, no doubt about that,” said Peecher, who felt he could change his ways this coming season if the board had simply given him a warning and a second chance. “It just killed me that it ended like that. . . . When the superintendent talked to me, he just said that the board decided to go in a different direction. There were no specifics — this situation, or this water bottle, or this bus ride, or anything.”
No one in McClave was more vocal about Peecher’s faults than Marty Canfield, a fiercely proud mother who believes her daughter was betrayed by her daughter’s own godfather. At season’s end, Canfield made a poignant speech to the school board, declaring that if Peecher was returned as coach, her two daughters wouldn’t return to the team.
“We’re talking about a very influential, impressionable time in a teenage girl’s life,” Canfield said. “If a girl thinks, ‘My parents are going to allow this guy to treat me like this,’ then are they going to grow up and think, ‘Is it all right for a man to treat me like this?’ It’s not right.”
While the community remains divided over the firing, the hiring of new coach Dave Stavely, Peecher’s former assistant, has been endorsed by everyone from the parents to the school board to Peecher himself.
“They brought in a very good man,” Canfield said. “He will expect hard work and dedication out of them, but he just won’t be an (expletive) about it.”
In a small town, where the streets are paved with dust, a winner is treated almost like a mythical figure. With Dick Peecher, the same holds true for how he lost.
Ryan Casey of The Denver Post contributed to this report.
Benjamin Hochman: 303-954-1294 or bhochman@denverpost.com
Dick Peecher’s record at McClave, where he won four Class 1A state championships in the past decade.
Season Record State tourney
2001 21-3 3rd place
2002 20-4 Runner-up
2003 23-2 Runner-up
2004 25-0 Champion
2005 25-0 Champion
2006 25-0 Champion
2007 14-6 None
2008 23-3 3rd place
2009 26-1 Champion
2010 22-3 Lost, first round
