Pennsylvania high school football coach resigns mid-season after clashing with parents, players

One of the top small-school high school football programs in Pennsylvania will play the rest of the 2025 season without its head coach.

On Monday, Williams Valley coach Stephen Sedesse resigned from his position midway through his third season at the helm. During his first two and a half years, the 29-year-old led the program to a 28-6 record and a pair of district championships.

The Vikings were off to a 6-1 start this year, but had major turmoil in their program after parent complaints, reported conduct issues by players, and disagreement with the school’s administration. According to multiple reports, Sedesse’s father — who served as the team’s defensive coordinator — also resigned his position. The younger Sedesse claimed in his resignation letter that parents took issue with his decision to discipline players on his roster for the team’s game against Panther Valley over the weekend.

According to a report from T102SportsNow, the school administration suspended both Sedesse and his father for two games Monday morning for sitting two players longer than they were previously told. Sedesse later informed the school of his resignation after the decision.

His letter claimed that he had previously been threatened by parents after loss, was unable to hold players accountable, and even had obscenities hurled at him from the stands.

Sedesse cites laundry list of issues with players, coaches, school

His full resignation letter can be found below:

“On Monday, October 6th, 2025, I am officially resigning as head football coach at Williams Valley High School. When I took this role, it was with hopes of changing a culture and helping in the pursuit of building student-athletes. My staff and I built a winning team on the field but more importantly a winning team off the field. We completed community service projects and rarely ran into eligibility problems. It was always an emphasis to be disciplined on the field and in the classroom. When you lose the ability to discipline and hold members of your team accountable, the ship will sink. That is where my decision is based.

As a coach you see things or hear things at practice that need to be addressed. At the end of the day the coaches make decisions on who will play and who will not play on Friday nights. When parents take the coaches’ ability to discipline and hold their child accountable, due to threats and defamatory statements, it is impossible to have trust. When parents can approach you at the locker room following a loss and yell obscenities from the stands, and get away with it, it creates a very bad environment for the coaches and the kids alike.

We are 28-6 as a staff and after (the) 28 wins I never had a parent attack me. After (each of) the six losses I had a parent or multiple parents threaten my job and livelihood. Each time nothing was done or handled, each time it happened again and again, like clockwork. As a 29-year-old head coach, when you have no support, you can’t make it work.

This isn’t the first or last time in Schuylkill County that parents ran out a young coach. We live in a world where parents and children are friends, they lack discipline and when their child tells a coach to “go (f***) themselves,” the parent deflects that behavior on the coach, the coach is the problem. When a coach disciplines their child, they get threatened that if their kid doesn’t start they better have extra security on Friday night. Everybody always makes the statement my kid is a great kid, he wouldn’t act like that. I agree to an extent it is out of the ordinary for certain kids to act out of character but it’s my job to handle it, so it doesn’t become an everyday occurrence.

Football is hard and it’s a team sport. You can’t win with ego, not one player is bigger than the program. If you allow that, you don’t have a program anymore. But add in parent pressure, and in today’s world the kid gets away with it, the parent gets away with it and the coaches get left out to dry. I thank my former players and coaches for the lessons I’ve learned throughout this 2.5-year journey, about coaching and life. The rumors of me being fired are false. In order to be fired I would have had to do something wrong. This is me stepping away from the parents and administration of Williams Valley.”

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