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Neighbors

Uehling uses coaching stipends to help AJUSD athletes, members of the community

Posted 5/13/21

Lance Uehling is about to cry.

It’s the last thing you expect from the tough guy sitting across from you, a football player and wrestler in his youth and now a Department of Corrections …

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Neighbors

Uehling uses coaching stipends to help AJUSD athletes, members of the community

Posted

Lance Uehling is about to cry.

It’s the last thing you expect from the tough guy sitting across from you, a football player and wrestler in his youth and now a Department of Corrections official.

But Mr. Uehling, a 1990 graduate of Apache Junction High School, is telling a story and even though it’s decades old it needs telling to explain why Mr. Uehling has used his coaching stipends to help the Apache Junction Unified School District community and others in the city of Apache Junction.

Mr. Uehling grew up poor. He can recall stealing $1 food stamps from his mother’s purse, using the stamps to buy a 25-cent pack of gum and then selling each stick of gum to fellow high school students for 25 cents. The profit margin was his lunch money for the day.

Things got worse when his parents split up and his mother wound up in the hospital, needing three stents after a heart attack. One afternoon, Mr. Uehling was at the home of then-Apache Junction wrestling coach Glenn McMinn. The bond between the coach and student was strong; today Mr. Uehling will say that if not for Coach McMinn, “I’d probably be dead or in prison. I know I wouldn’t be half the person I am today without that guy.”

Coach McMinn walked out of his home and saw Mr. Uehling filling buckets with water from a spigot in the front yard.

“Why are you taking water?” Coach McMinn said.

“The water is not on in my house. It’s been turned off,” Mr. Uehling replied.

“You don’t have any water in your house?” Coach McMinn said.

“No coach,” Mr. Uehling answered.

That night, Mr. Uehling went to work at Superstition Feed, where he would stack hay from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. When he awoke the next morning, the water in his mom’s house was on.

“I think he came by with some groceries for us, too,” Mr. Uehling said.

As he told the story, Mr. Uehling, 48, recalled something else Coach McMinn told him. A man’s life is not judged by how many people he steps on or steps through but by how many people he lifts up.

Those words — and Coach McMinn’s example — are why Mr. Uehling has over the years refused to cash the stipends he’s received as an assistant football coach and wrestling coach at AJHS. Instead, he’s given back to the school and the Apache Junction community he grew up in and still calls home.

Over the years Mr. Uehling has used his stipends to buy wrestling singlets, baseball jerseys, soccer shin pads, swimsuits for the swim team, football equipment, items for the Apache Junction Boys and Girls Club or to help the Wounded Warrior Project.

“I remember the trials and tribulations of growing up in that kind of economic situation and I think to myself, ‘Wait; how can I accept financial gains?’” Mr. Uehling said. “I revert back to Coach McMinn. I don’t know what he made as a stipend but I can tell you this, I never paid for a wrestling tournament, I never paid for headgear, I never paid for shoes, I never paid for training, clinics, travel or food.

“This is full circle for me.”

Editor’s note: Scott Bordow is the director of communications and community engagement for Apache Junction Unified School District.