It didn't take a magic 8-Ball, fortune teller or a sixth sense to see the news Friday from WCHS involving coach Mendy Stotts coming. If anything, her dismissal from the position of head coach of the Lady Pioneer basketball team seemed to be met more with an "about time" attitude when the news broke on the Standard Facebook page than any sort of shock from fans. 

Her one-year tenure never really seemed to even have a chance to take off. A few kids from her initial roster last May never made it out of the summer. Parents were calling for meetings (both with Stotts and WCHS administration) before a game was even played in November. And, perhaps the most polarizing topic was her dismissal of Sable Winfree after playing just one quarter in the season opener. 

Winfree's removal - a stunner after her run as one of the top guards in the district over the last three years - drew major backlash, highlighted by one fan showing up to multiple home games this year with a large sign calling for Stotts' removal as coach ("Make this great again - Coach and staff got to go" was the exact phrasing of the homemade sign held up at the Dalt). It wasn't a pleasant year for the Lady Pioneers, punctuated by the group winning just two of its last 14 games after Christmas break.

Personally, hearing Stotts wasn't going to be retained as coach made me think of the old adage, "Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me." Whether the decision to remove Stotts is the right decision will remain to be seen (though it felt almost necessary when her own players were sharing posts calling for  her dismissal during the season). What seems obvious now is the administration should've never hired Stotts in the first place.

When she was hired last May, I wrote about the delayed decision-making during the coaching search. Stotts was one of the first people interviewed, but it took nearly a month (and a lot of cold calls to others leading nowhere) for them to circle back and hire a coach that was dismissed as an assistant coach from the same program just four years prior. Lots of people predicted that, from the day she was hired, it was a doomed partnership. That's not on Stotts; it's on the people who didn't seem to grasp that her fit within the WCHS program was going to be rocky despite the evidence being pretty fresh. 

It's hard to give anybody a good pat on the back for a job well done in making the decision to part ways with a coach (even if it rarely happens at WCHS and may have been merited) knowing it shouldn't have been necessary. It's especially frustrating thinking that a handful of seniors - including one who entered the year with scholarship offers and finished it watching her former teammates from the stands - had to endure a final season they never would've hoped for because of a glaring lack of foresight last May. 

I guess WCHS starting the undoing process now instead of next year (or years after) is a step in the right direction, but now many of the same people are going to start another coaching search. 

How much faith will people have in their ability to make a better decision this time around? I guess we'll just wait and see.