By Bryce McKinnis — [email protected]
The Wideners are a staple of Chickasha High School athletics.
Zach and Angela have been married 33 years and have coached at Chickasha 25 years, where they’ve led the school’s cross country, track & field and tennis teams.
Their daughter, Nikissiah, was a state champion cheerleader at Chickasha and a talented runner. She was set to run cross country at Southwestern Oklahoma State before a calf injury derailed her career.
Nikissiah’s husband, Anthony Klipp, is a teacher at Chickasha (who was himself a cross country state qualifier at Chickasha) and assists coaching cross country and soccer. He was recruited to play soccer at University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma.
Their son, Zachary, was also a star runner at Chickasha High School and ran collegiate cross country and track at Oklahoma Baptist University. He recently deployed for a year-long tour to Africa with the Oklahoma National Guard.
“Sports have a special truth about life in them,” Angela said. “They give us pieces of wisdom.”
The Wideners met in high school. Angela was a cheerleader and played tennis while Zach was a baseball player at El Reno. They were inseparable after they attended the 1987 “Snow Blitz” together.
After graduating high school, they attended SWOSU together and married in 1990. Angela, who said she’d never envisioned herself coaching, started at nearby Union City sponsoring student council four years before Zach began his coaching career.
“I am actually painfully shy,” Angela said. “I thought I would live in my world of literature and books.”
Zach took a job as an assistant baseball coach at Chickasha and Angela joined him working in the junior high library and, in her second year, began coaching cheer on the side until she moved into the high school library, “where the cross country runners and parents knew” she had been a successful road racer.
Thanks to their urging, Angela agreed to coach cross country and track, but in the time that had passed, Zach had taken a job teaching history at the high school and stopped coaching. The roles had flipped, but an idea occurred to Angela.
“Since we had made it through working together in the same building 90% of our careers and acting as our own contractors when we built our house several years earlier and were still successfully married,” Angela said, “I thought that we would make a great team coaching cross country together.”
Their journey thereafter included coaching Zach, Nikissiah and even Anthony during their high school careers at Chickasha. Zach was Chickasha’s valedictorian and broke the school’s cross country record en route to two state qualifications on the trail before he donned the Bison green and gold.
“Our marriage and coaching relationship works because we believe that it is the result of what we do together that is the important element,” Angela said.
“I did not envision, when we both began teaching, that we would be coaching our children and future son-in-law together,” Zach said. “Life is a mystery because it is so unpredictable.”
Coaching Nikissiah and Zachary provided a vital perspective for Zach.
“Being able to coach your own children and go through that experience with them helped us view our athletes now and their successes, their setbacks and failures through a new lens,” Zach said. “We want our athletes to have the same support and encouragement and be treated by their coaches the way we wanted our own children to be handled.
“By coaching with that mindset, we think that makes us more personable and identifiable to our athletes.”
But after about 13 years of coaching track in the spring, then-athletic-director Yohance Brown presented a new spring project to Angela. He knew of her tennis background and approached her about taking over the program, in need of rebuilding. The move would require her to step aside from track.
“My heart was truly torn,” Angela said, “but Zach mistakenly said that if I took the tennis position that he would coach it with me. You know my answer.”
Angela took him up on the offer, thus the begin of their second sport coached together. Zach, though not a tennis player by trade, is a “brilliant athlete,” Angela says, who “sees the game and can advise and strategize as well or better than any coach who has ever stepped foot on a court.”
As a tandem, their success speaks for itself, but it isn’t easy. Coaching, Angela said, is like mariage.
“It takes practice, dedication, hard work [and] communication with your partner to say, ‘OK, we have dropped the first set, but I believe in us and we can take this second set back,’” she said. “‘and there is no one else I would rather have by my side in the final tiebreaker than you.’”
Though she had not planned on making a career of coaching, it’s been just alright as far as Angela is concerned.
“Coaching together is an extension of who we are. There are always times that get tense. We definitely don’t always agree on how to execute something or how a situation should be handled,” she said, “but at the end of the day, we both want the same ‘best things’ for each other and our athletes.”
“So far, that formula has produced several state qualifiers, lots of team and individual victories and a multitude of lifelong friends that still leave us in contact with former players today,” Zach said. “And that is what we believe is the real reward of coaching and teaching.”
