"When I went to review Stacie, I noticed a few bad reviews. I am here to say that I believe she is a great coach. She is extremely motivational and cares about the teams health. Stacie makes sure that we stretch and warm up before further physical activity. She is respectful, follows boundaries, and does not force athletes to run or exercise while they are injured. We only had one injury on the team the entire season though the injury was NOT related to any running or training that this person was involved in. Stacie handled this situation well and had the injured teammate sit out of any physical activity while their injury healed. She has scheduled and routine water breaks to ensure that everyone is hydrated. Overall, I would recommend Stacie Wentz as a cross country coach."
"Coach Wentz poses an immediate threat to the health of any athlete she coaches both physically and mentally. She will lecture, berate, and scold athletes for communicating with her as if she was one of their friends while she herself sends out emails and texts that look to be written by a 6 year old. She loves to share about her personal life often to the point where it becomes uncomfortable for athletes. Her training plans are a one size fits all model which are based on the Jack Daniel’s running book and Elle St. Pierre’s college training. Paces and mileage are assigned without consideration for an athletes individual needs or for any factor of us being human beings. It is expected that we finish every run and rep as if we are a machine and if we don’t we are soft or unfit. This leads to injuries on injuries, nearly every teammate of mine has had a minor injury that has turned into a major injury due to Stacie forcing us to push through. She is completely unorganized with workouts, often just copying and pasting training plans and workout spreadsheets from previous years without bothering to even change the dates on the pages. At practice she carries the unprofessionalism with her as she will punish athletes for small mistakes and gossip about athletes to other athletes on the team. In one case a van door wasn’t fully closed and water bottles and spikes fell out when she drove away. She blamed this on the team and decided a fair punishment was that we all had to run the 3 miles back to school carrying our spikes and water, she then walked around the track telling athletes about how incompetent their fellow athletes are right in front of us. Stacie wants to have open feedback from athletes but is unable to receive any negative feedback and puts up a wall of intimidation to prevent any athletes from feeling comfortable enough to approach her. Stacie is completely focused on boosting her own image as a coach and every accomplishment by an athlete is completely credited to her while every failure is the fault of the athletes. Don’t be fooled by her resume of athletes who had the unfortunate luck of having her as their coach while they found success. She is knowledgeable about the sport and every once in a while her training can work for athletes but isn’t without the athlete being able to make tweaks and changes to the training when necessary. She is not a coach that an athlete can trust and follow blindly, they must have an understanding of what works for them and be able to make adjustments. I would not recommend that anybody takes the risk of being in the same facility as Stacie."
"She cares a lot about results. She forces runners to run through injury, which results in them getting hurt more. I heard the phrase "you need to start acting like a collegate athlete" more times than I can count. She loves to punish athltes for coming to practice late, and then shows up late to many practices herself. "
"Coach Russ greatly improved my times on my college team and took the time to coach me for my marathons going as far to even drive around the course during the first one and cared about my academics "
"She is a coach that has been around for a while. She knows the sports and knows when to push you and when to lay off. She cares a lot about your academics and understands that someone’s you need to be a student first and foremost. "
"She has zero strengths. Every single aspect of her coaching is a liability.
From a purely technical standpoint, her training plans are bad. Claims that the training plans are customized for every athlete but used the exact same training plan for every athlete every single year. The workout paces she gives are far too fast and you will get overtrained quickly if you try to follow them. She has zero understanding of recovery, usually only assigning 1-2 recovery days per week and everything else is pretty much all out. More than half the team will be injured at any point. She also has zero understanding on how structure a season schedule, or how to taper for big races. She will give incredibly difficult, high volume workouts just 2 days before the conference meet.
She has terrible people skills. Incredibly negative attitude 24/7 and generally unapproachable. She is unable to keep her cool in stressful situations and is prone to extreme outbursts. Completely unable to emotionally connect with her athletes, and believes exclusively in punishment/negative reinforcement for underperforming members of the team. Clearly does not care about most people on the team and does very little to hide it. Will openly gossip about her athletes (if you tell her any sensitive/personal information expect the entire team to know about it within 24 hours). Usually will pick 2-3 athletes a year to just outright bully until they quit the team. Has no sense of humility and will CONSTANTLY remind you of how grateful you should be that you are coached by her.
Her communication is terrible. Constantly forgets to relay important information, such as practice times, to the team. The majority of her texts/emails are borderline incomprehensible due to the amount of spelling and grammatical errors. If you ask her for any clarifications she acts like its your fault that she messed up. She is incredibly harsh on athletes that show up late to practices, but will usually be late herself several times per week with no prior communication or acceptable excuse.
She has now been forced out of her position by her own athletes at two different universities. That should tell you all you need to know. "
"Coach Wentz is great on an individual coaching level however when working with a bigger team she can struggle. Her professionalism can be spotty at times"
"There are not enough characters to explain how horrible of a person and a coach Stacie Wentz is. She’s degrading, makes inappropriate comments to her athletes (calling them the r word, and overweight comments) she trys to turn her athletes against one and another, and she’s incredible fake and dishonest. The only good thing that came from being an athlete for her program was recognizing my worth, and how no one deserves to deal with her as a coach. "
"Stacie Wentz is not only a terrible coach but is an awful human being. She fails to realize that she is completely incapable of athlete connection and motivation. She is constantly pitting the team against one another while she believes and acts like she is the center of attention at all times. Running for her has been the worst experience I have lived through as I became worse athletically and mentally. Could probably legitimately be sued for some sort of abuse. Doesn't even understand the sport. "
"She was nightmare. I left the team along with almost every other freshman . Nasty, degrading, rude. I cannot say enough bad things about her. I wish i had done my homework before signing up. Look at her retention rate of track team before you join! "
"Out of my experience freshman year for track, Stacie Wentz was the worst head coach of any organization I have ever had. I do not have enough characters to illustrate all unintelligent things she did. "
"Bad. All she does is complain about how much harder everyone needs to work. Not one bit approachable. Only takes interest in the people who will come top 1 or 2 in each event. She is fake when she tries to get you on her team. When you get on the team, she completely turns on you. "
"Everyone quit because of her. She's passive aggressive, favors a couple of good athletes or those that suck up to her, and will lie to your face if it helps her. She brought the program up to where it is but she did so with ruthless disregard for the athletes. Expect to get injured if you run cross country for her. Expect to get cut freshman year."
"Isn't easy to approach, will usually get mad if you ask questions about training but pretends to be easy to approach. Training methods aren't logical, two interval or threshold repeat workouts every week during the season. "
"Only thing that kept me at Trinity was my teammates, otherwise if I had know about her prior, I would've enjoyed my four years playing for a Coach who is actually capable and cares somewhere else."
"Stacie Wentz was an abysmal Cross Country coach. She overworked and injured over half the Mens team at USJ. She constantly thought athletes were lying about injuries and illnesses. Only 3 men on the team were able to compete in every race during the season because every other member was injured and could not race at one point or another. Instead of having direct one on one confrontations with athletes about issues she would attempt to use the upper class men to confront them for her. Constantly Passive aggressive. If you were not the top runner there was about a 50% chance she would be at the finish line waiting for you to come through, and if she did end up being there it was about a 50% chance that she would cheer you on when you kicked in. When getting dinner the night before the conference championship meet she told her athletes the budget was 15 dollars and then proceeded to order a 25 dollar meal. Constantly reminds her athletes how grateful they should be to be coached by her. Seems to only wants athletes to succeed for her own recognition. After the conference championship meet she was so upset at the teams performance that when we got back to campus she didn't give an end of the season speech, and instead told us to put the tent away and then proceeded to get in her car and take off without saying a word to us about the meet or the season. Preaches about how communication is so important but is extremely unapproachable and would get very angry with athletes if they said anything that was not exactly what she wanted to hear. Cannot connect with her athletes. Has told her athletes that she is not paid very much and has said "I don't get paid enough for this", needless to say but it is wildly unprofessional to tell your athletes that. The team culture was Us vs. Her. To be fair one of the positive things about her was that she is really passionate about the sport but unfortunately passion does not make you better at coaching."
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