HS Football: Sedesse steps down as Williams Valley head coach
Williams Valley head coach Stephen Sedesse poses with his team as he accepts the T-102 Coach of the Year award last spring. Sedesse resigned as the Vikings' head coach Monday.
TOWER CITY — Williams Valley’s quest for a third straight District 11 Class AA football championship will have to be directed by a new head coach.
Stephen Sedesse resigned from his post as the Vikings’ head coach Monday afternoon, the end result of a 10-day saga involving out-of-control parental complaints, insubordinate players and the lack of support for the coaching staff by the Williams Valley administration.
Williams Valley athletic director Ben Ancheff, who is also a member of the football coaching staff, confirmed Sedesse’s departure later Monday.
Sedesse, 29, took over at Williams Valley prior to the 2023 season when Tim Savage was not re-hired after 11 seasons at the helm. Sedesse, a former quarterback and assistant coach under Savage, guided the Vikings to a 28-6 record and a pair of district crowns during his tenure.
The Vikes went 10-3 in 2023, beating Schuylkill Haven in the District 11 Class AA title game before falling to District 2 champion Dunmore in the opening round of the PIAA Class AA playoffs. Williams Valley was 12-2 overall last season, beating Haven again in the District 11 AA final before losing to Riverside in the state playoffs.
Williams Valley ended the 2024 season as the No. 1-ranked team in the final T102 Sports Now Super 7 High School Football Poll and Sedesse was selected as the T-102 Coach of the Year.
This season, Williams Valley opened the season ranked No. 1 in the T102 Sports Now Super 7 poll and has been listed among the top 10 Class AA teams in the state by PennLive.com the entire season. The Vikings won their first five games before falling 43-29 to Schuylkill Haven in a battle of unbeatens Friday, Sept. 26, in Williamstown.
Arguments and confrontations with parents after that game and detrimental conduct by the team’s two top players, both during the game and after, led to the suspension of those two players by the Williams Valley coaching staff for the first half of Friday’s Schuylkill-Colonial Blue Division win over Panther Valley, Sedesse said. The Vikings won the game 35-14 to improve to 6-1 overall.
According to sources, the school administration suspended both Stephen Sedesse and his father, defensive coordinator Mike Sedesse, for two games Monday morning for sitting the two players longer than they were previously told. Monday’s suspension and continued personal attacks on both Sedesse and his family business by parents and Williams Valley fans led to his resignation, Stephen Sedesse said. Mike Sedesse also resigned his position Monday.
In his resignation letter, obtained by T102 Sports Now and edited for punctuation, Stephen Sedesse said the following:
“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.”
