Rose Ella Cheek

Serving winners

SELF

PORTRAIT

Date and place of birth:

June 8, 1956, in Victorville, Calif.

Occupation:

Volleyball and girls track coach and teacher at Siloam Springs High School

My favorite victory was

winning the state championship at Greenwood in 2008.

Someone I look up to is

my mom and dad.

The best advice I ever received is

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Before a big match, I like to

circle up, hold hands and pray with my other coaches.

The biggest difference between volleyball in 1981 and today is

the speed of the game.

My students would say I

have a lot of stories to share.

Something I’d like to know more about is

technology. I don’t like sitting behind the computer.

I would rather be up moving around.

If I weren’t a coach and teacher, I would

be a cruise director.

The car I drive is a

Jeep Grand Cherokee.

The thing people are most surprised to find out about me is

I always wanted to be a Broadway dancer.

My sister and I would entertain our grandma by dancing and singing for her when we were little. I loved it!

One word to sum me up:

passionateSILOAM SPRINGS - Rose Cheek would have likely been a great volleyball player.

It’s impossible to say with absolute certainty, as volleyball wasn’t one of the handful of girls sports Cheek’s high school offered in the mid-1970s. Cheek is short, 5-1 1/2 at the most, which is hardly big enough to get on the court for most teams.

But the longtime volleyball coach at Siloam Springs High School wouldn’t have been one to let a thing like a lack of height keep her on the bench.

“She would have never let that ball hit the floor,” says Cheek’s assistant coach, Joellen Wright of Gentry. “She would have scrapped and never would have quit. She would have been in big girls’ faces, screaming, ‘You have to block!’

“I’d have loved to coach her, because she would have been a total team player.”

Height wouldn’t have relegated Cheek to the sidelines, just as a one-time lack of volleyball knowledge didn’t keep her from becoming arguably the most successful coach of the sport in Arkansas history. When she took over the position in 1981,one of the first things she did was pull her players together and confess that she knew nothing about the game.

“I was very honest with the girls,” she recalls. “I just told them, ‘I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t know anything about volleyball. You’re going to have to show me.’”

Cheek might have lacked volleyball expertise, but she has never lacked competitiveness. She set out to make herself a student of the game, pushing herself even harder than she did her players. She attended clinics and camps, observing firsthand how volleyball was supposed to be played.

In 2001, she led Siloam Springs to its first state volleyball championship. Three years later, the Lady Panthers won the first of a record six consecutive state titles. No Arkansas high school has won more state volleyball titles than Siloam Springs’ seven.

“She is so competitive,” Wright says. “She wouldn’t care if we were playing checkers, shewould want to [win].”

Yet it’s not wins that drive Cheek; it’s improvement. Whether it’s in volleyball, track or her health classes, she wants her kids to get better.

Victories are great, and Cheek’s fiercely competitive nature means she will do everything possible to make sure Siloam Springs ends up on the winning side, but it’s not a goal. It’s a result.

“Rose is highly competitive, but she’s not out there pushing them, ‘Win win win!’” says Debbie Wann of Siloam Springs, a teacher at the high school whose daughter Suzanne ran track under Cheek in the mid-’90s. “It’s ‘Are you pushing yourself? Are you doing your best? Are you getting better?’ If you do that, you can go home feeling good about what you’ve done - and you will often win as a result.”

‘ABSOLUTE BEST LIFE’

Cheek’s competitiveness was born of dire poverty.

She grew up incredibly poor in Kansas, Okla .,one of seven siblings, plus a half-brother who occasionally lived with the family in their two-bedroom house. The four girls shared a single mattress, in a room where two brothers slept in an old Army bunk bed.

Cheek, 56, likes to regale her students with stories from her destitute childhood, of how starting the family’s ancient station wagon meant the siblings pushed it until the engine backfired.

“[Our family’s poverty] pushed her into having the drive she has,” says sister Linda Welch of Kansas. “It gave her the ambition to be able to help others become what they wanted to become, no matter what circumstances are, if you allow yourself to believe and push forward.”

Cheek’s father, William John Cheek Jr., was a disabled World War II veteran; his benefits were the only reason Rose was able to attend Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Okla. He could be a stern disciplinarian, and didn’t hesitate to cut a switch when Rose acted up, which was often.

Yet there was never any doubt in Rose’s mind that either he or her mother, Snorra May, loved their children. The Cheeks couldn’t afford dental care, and every day Rose would meticulously wad up pieces of white toilet paper to fill the holes in her teeth, until her father realized how much it was upsetting her.

So he sold some of the dirt on the family’s land, and paid for his children to go to the dentist and get their teeth fixed. Similarly, when Rose and her sister were in the homecoming court, he sold a cow to buy material for their dresses.

“We had so much love,” Welch says. “We may not have had a lot of space, but we had closeness. We knew that you could always turn to family.”

Rose describes herself as a “feisty, ornery” kid, one who ‘‘deserved every whuppin’” her dad gave her. She often channeled her energies into the few girls sports her high school offered in those pre-Title IX days - softball, track and six-on-six basketball.

Off the court, Cheek realized that she loved to get glammed up with big hair and lots of makeup. There was no money in the family to afford such things, of course, and her father didn’t like the idea of his girls wearing what he disdainfully called “that paint,” but he reached a compromise: They could buy hair spray and makeup if they were willing to work for it.

So Rose and a sister started getting up around 4:30 a.m. to milk cows.

“When I was growing up, I hated being poor,” Cheek says. “Everyone had things and I did not, and it was embarrassing. As you get older and wiser, I realize I had the absolute best life. It taught me to work real hard.”

Cheek still lives on that land in Kansas. It’s about 30 minutes from her house to the high school, and her drive time each day is when she reflects and talks with God.

She can’t imagine living anywhere else. Cheek is country girl at heart, and her home is an escape. She’s surrounded by family there, and when she’s at home she can work in her garden, ride a four-wheeler, spend time with her boyfriend of three years, Terry Huff, or simply go down to the Illinois River, which runs by her backyard, and wave at the people who are floating on it. (Cheek is divorced, and one of the people who lives on the family’s land is her former stepson, along with his four children.)

“It is an absolutely beautiful place,” she says. “I live [at the high school] more than anywhere, so when I get home, I’m real bad about answering my cell phone.”

LEARNING THE SPORT

Cheek is certain she got her first coaching job because no one else wanted it.

After graduating from college, she took a job at Moseley School, a tiny country school in Delaware, Okla. She coached six different grade levels of boys and girls basketball teams, the same number of baseball and softball teams, track and field, and even was the head coach of two football teams.

She jokes that she had no life those two years at Moseley, but is quick to add that she led the school to its first football victory in three years. It didn’t take long for Cheek to realize that she had made the right career choice.

“She thrives being around kids and seeing them improve,” Wright says. “She engages the kids and truly cares about them. I think that’s what keeps her going.”

In 1981, the volleyball coaching job opened at Siloam Springs, and Cheek took it. Volleyball was radically different in those days, a slow, plodding sport that consisted of 15-minute games, and whoever led at the buzzer won the game, regardless of how many points they had scored.

Today, it’s a fast-paced game, in which every serve results in a point on the scoreboard. It requires intense training, as players are significantly more athletic than they were three decades ago.

“Oh my gosh, is it exciting!” Cheek says. “The progression of the game, it’s become so fast. Rally scoring has done so much for our game.

“I tell the girls all the time, ‘You just don’t know how much I wish I could have played this game in high school or college.’”

After taking the job at Siloam Springs, Cheek set out to learn all she could about the game. She’s a visual learner, so rather than read books on the sport, she attended clinics and spoke with successful coaches.

Seven state championships later, she still spends a lot of time finding ways to improve herself as a volleyball coach. By now, she knows plenty of game strategy, but her real strength lies in her ability to manage players. Like during the 2005 state final match against Wynne, in which Siloam Springs was crushed 25-7 in the second game. Cheekwas planning to scream at her players before the next game started, but at the last moment decided to say something calm and reassuring instead. The Lady Panthers won the next two games, and with them, the match.

Or the 2008 state final against Greenwood, which was playing on its home court and had defeated Siloam Springs multiple times earlier in the season. Cheek held a grueling practice the weekend before the state tournament started, then changed the Lady Panthers’ starting lineup on the eve of the final.The result was a victory, and a fifth consecutive title.

“The biggest thing is that she remembers [which] kids work together, and she knows high school girls,” Wright says. “She relates to them so great, it’s amazing. She can bark at them and then love on them, she can get them out of their shell, but she just constantly cares about her girls.”

Cheek credits much of her success to Wright, who came on board as her full-time assistant in 2004, the year Siloam Springs won the first of those six consecutive state titles. She’s constantly seeking Wright’s input, and although both say they’re usually good for at least one serious blowup a season, they are always able to quickly put it behind themand focus on the team.

Cheek adds that she has always communicated well with high school-age kids - not just girls, but also the boys who fill her health class, whom she has persuaded togo out for sports, and whom she has coached in track. (She coaches the boys in the relays.)

Wann, whose daughter ran track under Cheek, had two children take health classes from her. She says Cheek’s honest, funny approach made her one of her children’s favorite teachers.

“Health can be kinda dry,” Wann says. “Rose handles some situations that can be a little tricky, and she does it with good common sense, humor and a touch of realism, so that when kids are out in the real world, they know what they’re facing.”

WHAT MATTERS

High atop Siloam Springs’ sparkling new gymnasium there are seven banners, one for each of the Lady Panthers’ state volleyball championships.

Cheek’s in awe of them, just as she often finds it hard to believe she has been so often honored individually; she’s a four-time winner of the Arkansas High School Coaches Association Volleyball Coach of the Year award, and was named the 2011 national volleyball coach of the year by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Yet there’s a plaque in her office that means more to her than those awards - a simple one, predating her time at Siloam Springs. Inscribed on a black panel, atop a small piece of wood, are the words:

TO THE BEST COACH A TEAM COULD EVERHAVE.

YOU’RE MORE THAN A COACH.

YOU’RE A FRIEND.

WE JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW

WE LOVE YOU VERY MUCH

8TH GRADE CLASS OF “80”

“It’s like a dream sometimes,” Cheek says of the seven titles. “But it’s never been about the winning; what I’ve really wanted is for the kids to be successful, to take something they learn from volleyball and apply it to their life.”

The kids at Moseley who gave Cheek that plaque, the ones who are now in their 40s, they “saved my life,” Cheek says.

On Christmas Day 1979, midway through Cheek’s first year as a teacher, her dad died of a heart attack. She was devastated, and wanted nothing more than to go home each day, close all the shades in her house and go to sleep.

Every day, though, the kids made her laugh, and they lifted her out of her depression. She has never forgotten the positive impact those kids made on her life.

And in the decades since, whether it has been through volleyball, track or health class, she has striven to make the same difference in her kids’ lives.

“The thing with Rose is she has a compassion for kids,” Welch says. “Whether it’s coaching or teaching them, she’s trying to get the best out of them.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 31 on 10/14/2012

Upcoming Events