By Tom Nader

Publisher and Editor

The “Coaches in the Classroom” feature is a weekly series that spotlights and celebrates coaches throughout Portage County, who spend their days in the classrooms and hallways leading today’s student-athletes to be tomorrow’s leaders.

Today’s spotlight is on second-year Aurora High School boys basketball coach Cody Calhoun, who is a middle school Intervention Specialist at Aurora.

• School district: Aurora.
• Years at Aurora?: Two.
  

  CODY CALHOUN

• Classes taught?: Sixth grade Intervention Specialist.
• What made you want to become an educator?: I always enjoyed school growing up, and I wanted to pass that passion along to my students. I also wanted to work with kids to prepare them in order to be successful in life.
• What is your favorite part of your job?: The best part of my job is seeing when something finally clicks with a student and they feel success.
• What have you learned about being an educator that you didn’t know before you started?: One thing that I have learned is just how many people it takes to be successful. From the administration, office staff, fellow teachers, community members and families, it takes everyone to work together for a school to be successful.
• Which teachers influence you to go into education?: Mark Kinsley and Dan Gourley.
• How do you apply some of your coaching to the classroom?: Similar to how we have to build our fundamental skills first on the court, I try to build our fundamental skills in the classroom every day. We also have to continue to “rep” things in the classroom like we rep our plays in practice to stay sharp.
• How do you apply some of your classroom to your coaching?: One thing that I have earned is that not every student or player learns the same way. We have to work to understand how each player learns best and work on this to help them understand what we are doing.
• Funniest thing that has ever happened to you in a classroom?: While at Rootstown, I had a student who was very quiet, but beginning to come out of his shell. One Friday morning, he wrote a pregame speech for (teacher and football coach) Mark Geis, so we had him deliver the speech, with music playing in the back of the room, to my class and to Mark.
• Mentors in your building who have helped you along the way?: Our building administrators Mark Abramovich and Ryan Beaumont and our entire Special Education Department have been so helpful to me over the last couple of years, as I have learned how things operate in a new building and district.