By Mark Eckel

After coaching three sports for most of her adult life, and a fourth for a year, winning state high school titles in two of them, Shelly Dearden had enough.

“I was tired,’’ Dearden said. “I was always going, going, going. I needed a break. I figured if I missed it, I could always go back.’’

The break lasted two years and when Dearden did return to coaching it came in an unexpected and unprecedented move.

Dearden had won a girls’ soccer state title with the Ewing (N.J.) High School team in 1991 and then did the same with the Ewing girls’ basketball team in 1999. She had also coached softball and soccer at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, N.J. was an assistant women’s basketball coach at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J and even coached the Rider volleyball team for a season.

What was coming next surprised even her.

“A couple of years after I retired from coaching, Walt Bittner retired from the boys job (at Ewing High),’’ Dearden recalled. “Some of the players and parents from the boys’ team came to me and said, ‘Why don’t you apply for the job?’ I thought about it and said ‘why not.’ 

 “It was unprecedented, but I didn’t care. What’s the difference, as long as you know the game? I never looked at it as a woman coaching a boys’ team. I looked at as a coach, coaching a team. That’s how I always looked at it.

“People looked at it differently. It was wow, this has never happened around here before. This is different. When the press got a hold of it, it became a bigger thing. That made me think, maybe it is a bigger thing.’’

 It got real big when it 2012, Dearden coached the Ewing boys’ team to its first state title in 20 years and in the process became the first coach in New Jersey history to ever win a state title in both boys’ and girls’ basketball. She is also believed to be the only high school coach in the country to coach three different sports to a state title.       

Dearden coached the Ewing girls from 1998-2002 and compiled a 243-117 record. She’s coached the boys from 2004 to the present and has a 149-70 record.

If basketball is basketball, whether it’s being played by males or females, than winning is winning when it’s being coached by males or females.

 “I didn’t change,’’ Dearden said. “I was just as hard on the girls as I am on the boys. There’s some different strategy, the game is quicker, played over the rim more, but I’m more or less the same. I haven’t changed what I do. What I expect from the team is the same.’’

What she expects is hard work, dedication, and the willingness to win. She doesn’t expect to be treated any differently, because she’s a woman coaching boys.   

“Luckily, I never had that here,’’ she says of being questioned because of her gender. “Outside of here, outside of these doors there were a lot of questions. Everyone had questions. The kids here knew me.   They knew me from the hallways; they knew me from coaching the girls. They knew my reputation. A lot of them did their homework and knew who I was.’’

Dearden was a three-sport star in those same Ewing hallways as a player in the 80s. She was a 1,000-point scorer in basketball and a stalwart on the soccer and softball fields as well. Her family name, Walters, also carried weight in the community where her father, Fred, a long-time minor league baseball player ran the township’s parks and recreation department for years. 

“No one ever challenged me here,’’ Dearden said. “Nobody ever said ‘you’re a woman, you don’t know what you’re saying.’ Outside of here there were questions from other teams. A reporter came to our first scrimmage and he tells me after the scrimmage is over, people were saying ‘I guess they had nobody else to hire for the job.’ That was kind of stuff we heard early on. Nobody has ever come up to my face and said anything. Behind my back, I’m not so sure what’s said. I probably don’t want to know.

“Hey, I’m the girl in the boys club. That’s the only way to put it.’’  

If there were critics they were long gone after Dearden won every year she coached the boys, with the phoenix being that 2012 season.

“I never felt I had to prove anything,’’ she said. “But it was in the back of my mind that people would question me if we didn’t win.’’

In her first year she took a young team to an above .500 record and did better her second year, but not good enough by her own standards.   

“By the third year I said to myself if we don’t start to get it done, I even went into my AD and said if we don’t go far in the state tournament, make noise, I might have to step down,’’ she said. “Maybe I’m not getting across to the kids, not as woman, but as a coach.’’

Ewing won the Central Jersey title that year. Then in 2012 the Blue Devils won the state title.

“That put the icing on the cake,’’ Dearden said. “I got texts from a lot of people, friends, who said they can’t question you anymore. But every coach gets questioned, that’s the nature of the job.’’

While she doesn’t fashion herself as a trendsetter or a trailblazer, she wouldn’t mind some female company in that “Boys’ Club’’.

“I think there are plenty of women who could coach men,’’ Dearden said. “But will they be accepted in their school system, or in their state, or their part of the country. That’s the question they have to ask.’’