After Leaving the Hill, Ted Stanley Faces a Different Kind of Challenge

Former Kenyon Football Coach Ted Stanley poses with his daughter Emmerson and his parents, Ted and Mary Ann. (Salt Lake City Tribune)

After failing to win a game in two consecutive seasons as head coach of the football program at Kenyon, Ted Stanley resigned, eventually finding work as an assistant coach at Weber State in Ogden, Utah. After taking a step down the coaching ladder, Stanley is facing an entirely new challenge: raising a child on his own.

The child, Emmerson, survives her mother and Ted’s wife, Jocelyn Prewitt-Stanley, who passed away four days after giving birth. Ted and Jocelyn met at Grinnell, where he was a defensive line coordinator and she was an admissions counselor. They soon became romantically involved and married in 2005.

Eventually, Stanley arrived at Kenyon, where he would coach for nine years. Despite his own ambitions, the Salt Lake Tribune portrays Kenyon as a school complacent with athletic mediocrity:

The school’s elite academic culture made winning difficult and losing tolerable — to administrators, not him.

Though Stanley works at WSU in Ogden, he commutes to and from his childhood home in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his mother Mary Ann. Because of his long hours, Mary Ann parents Emmerson when Stanley cannot.

In this period of difficulty, Stanley has received an outpouring of support, especially from his colleagues at Weber.

“Whatever it takes,” said Jody Sears, WSU’s interim head coach, “we’ve got to get this little girl raised.”