University of Saint Joseph

"Make sure you make an excellent first impression. Stacie Wentz was incredibly nice to me because I was one of her favorites. However, she treated other members of the team with contempt and ridicule. She was hypocritical, often screaming at team members for unprofessionalism when she would do the exact same unprofessional actions. Her poor behavior could be tolerated in my opinion, but her poor training and unreasonable expectations were intolerable. Her workout plans are erratic and are not informed by the latest sports science. If you are reading this right now Stacie, I would recommend mental health treatment and a career change. To her future athletes, don't be afraid to create and follow your own plan. It is almost guaranteed to be better than hers. "

"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 "