Missel reduction

An era will end June 30 as Cheney High School assistant principal and athletics director Jim Missel has announced his retirement at the end of the school year.

Missel said the decision has been in the works for awhile, and this past weekend he and his wife Robin did a lot of thinking and talking, including a phone call from Jim to his brother Tom, currently a private investigator but also an Eastern Washington University line coach and assistant coach under former head coach Paul Wulff.

“He said, ‘Jim, life’s too short,’” Missel said. “If you can do it, you need to retire.”

It’s definitely something Jim Missel can do. A 1977 graduate of Mead High School, Missel played football at Montana State, including the national championship team of 1981, and graduated with an education degree in 1982.

He first taught in a small school in Melstone, Mont., and then returned to Spokane where he taught in the Central Valley School District and coached at Ferris High School. After five years he became a football coach and dean of students at South Kitsap High School in Port Orchard. He returned to Ferris to coach, took the assistant principal position at Lakeside High School in 1998 and was named to his current position at Cheney High School in summer 2001.

During Missel’s tenure at Cheney, the school has changed classifications several times, moved from the Border League combination of Idaho and Washington schools to the Greater Spokane League and finally to the Great Northern League. Coaches and athletes under his tutelage have enjoyed a variety of league, regional and state successes, including state titles in boys’ soccer in 2013 and girls cross country in 2011.

Through it all Missel has been a tireless advocate of students, athletes and non-athletes alike, often attending not only sports contests but musical and drama productions, taking pictures he eventually displays on a large TV monitor hanging outside his office near the school’s main entrance. He hopes to maintain that role in retirement.

“I’m still an educator at heart,” he said. “I still want to work with kids.”

Missel mentioned several opportunities for this in his soon to be retirement home in Surprise, Ariz. near Phoenix. Right now, he has several accomplishments he wishes to see through to completion before he turns in his keys, including seeing the inaugural “High School Champion of the Stars Recognition Night” awards banquet become a reality and hiring five new head coaches at the high school.

Missel attributes a lot of the success he has enjoyed at Cheney High School to the support of the community and the school board. Cheney’s success couldn’t have been achieved without it, he added.

Missel admits that the thought of what he’s going to do with a lot of free time in retirement is “a little scary.” Getting up at 6 a.m. and not receiving a phone call about a gym not being available, or an extra activity bus needing to be reserved will be different at first, but Missel believes it’s time to face that reality.

“It’s time to move on and let the school take a new direction,” he said.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.