For the past seven years, Jamie Menefee has coached for the Fossil Ridge High School girl’s basketball team. As head coach for four years, Menefee led the team to win almost 75% of the games they played.

Just a few days after the team’s season came to an end following their loss to Fruita Monument, Menefee announced via the team’s Instagram account that he would not be returning to coach next season.

While Menefee’s resignation seemed sudden and shocking to many, the decision was something he considered for a long time. As each season passed, Menefee took time to consider whether continuing to coach was in his best interest.

Although coaching has been a source of joy for Menefee, the negative aspects of the job started to make the job more difficult than rewarding. “There was a very small faction of negativity that started to steal the joy of coaching from me,” Menefee comments.

Although the announcement came so suddenly following the end of the season, the knowledge that this season would be his last began to take hold around a month prior, and the decision only became more concrete as time went on.

“Some of that negativity just kept, you know, pushing me down,” Menefee explains. 

There were many reasons for his leaving, such as a strain on his job as a teacher, the stress of managing parents’ complaints, and logistics of managing a team that went along with being head coach, but Menefee looks back on his time coaching Fossil’s team fondly.

The relationships he has gotten to make with each of his players is what Menefee will miss most about coaching. “No doubt, I will miss the girls,” Menefee states. “It has been such a pleasure, and I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with the girls that I did get to work with.”

After announcing his resignation, Menefee has received heartfelt messages from past players that have made him remember all the positives of his time as a coach. 

“It makes me realize that what we’ve done in the last four years has been, generally speaking, wonderful,” he says.

Although he has many wonderful things to say about his time as head coach, he is adamant that he would not take up the job again. “If you don’t love it, and you’re not all in, it can become a strain,” Menefee remarked. 

While the job of head coach is not in his future, Menefee believes that his love of coaching may bring him back to an assistant coaching position, in which he could continue to work with basketball players without the added stress of managing the team.