(Exira) Perhaps the area family more synonymous with coaching than any other is the Petersen clan, originally out of Kimballton. It’s part three of the KSOM/KS95 Sports Fathers Day Series.
Tom Petersen is the current girls basketball and golf coach at Exira-EHK. He recently resigned from his head football and baseball coaching posts. So far at the high school level he has coached his two oldest children, Tyler and Trey. “Hopefully they enjoyed it at times. I know it wasn’t always the funnest thing for them. I know they have some stories. Maybe they’ll keep that to themselves. I’ve got two more coming up. This will be a new experience coaching my daughter. We’ll see how that goes. Overall it’s been a real treat for me.”
He grew up with his dad coaching him in baseball and has had several siblings turn in long and successful coaching careers of their own. He was even coached by a copule of his older brothers. “I think maybe sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats. I remember multiple times with my dad and then I had my brother Trent as a coach. My brother Tony coached me through middle school and high school. It’s the same thing. They are family and they are going to be the hardest on myself. They do it for a reason, #1 to set an example for everyone else that you don’t get special treatment, and trust me we never did. I look back on some of those things, you know you don’t always understand it at the ages of 14-18, but when you get older you appreciate why they did what they did. I’m sure appreciative from the things I learned starting with my father and my mom and all my brothers and sister. It’s a coaches family. It’s been in our blood for I don’t know how long.”
Family and discipline were the two biggest things Tom Petersen learned from his dad. “Dad loved us and it was tough love. All the way from top to bottom he had my oldest brothers all the way through little league. That was a lot different time in the early 70’s. I know my dad loved me, but he had different ways of showing it. He was very proud of the kids and the things he taught us. On the baseball field #1 was respect and #2 was discipline. He treated all of his players the same. He didn’t care where you were from, what background you came from, or who you were. Everybody had a fair and equal opportunity to succeed. He kind of demanded excellence.”
Tom’s son Trey is a 2023 graduate with intentions of getting into coach. His son Tyler is a current student at Northwest Missouri State and does some youth coaching in his free time. “I enjoy it. I don’t know how much I will get into the coaching profession, because I do know that coaching has had kind of a toll on my father’s health. I hear and see more of the downside than the upside to coaching, but that’s just because I’ve been around it all my life. I’ve been at football, baseball, and basketball practice since I’ve been in 4th and 5th grade. But I do enjoy coaching my younger brother Thomas.”
Tyler remembers the times in baseball when his dad would get agitated about Tyler shaking off a pitch call and in football when the play call got changed from the time it was sent in to when the ball was snapped. “There were a couple of times where I would flip a play in football and he would scream ‘no’ from the sidelines. We would end up getting a first down or a touchdown and I’d come back to the sideline and say, ‘I know what I’m doing, trust me’ and he goes, ‘I don’t want to.'”
He admits there were some times where being the coach’s kid wasn’t the easiest thing because coaches aren’t always the most popular. “The friendships were there, but there were some times in terms of a team aspect where I could tell a couple of teammates weren’t very happy with some things that were going down and kind of reflected that to me a little bit. That comes with it being the coaches son and you just learn to get over it.”
Tom Petersen:
Tyler Petersen:
