The opportunity to get back to her roots was too good for Sue Tameling to pass up.
After spending more than a decade as an administrator at various schools around the country, Tameling decided it was time to return to the sporting realm, leaving her post as principal at Chicago Christian High School in Illinois to become the new athletic director at Greenwood Christian Academy.
“I loved being a principal,” Tameling said, “but athletics is my first love, and so this allows me to work closer with students.”
Tameling grew up playing a number of different sports growing up in Michigan, competing in softball and field hockey at Calvin College. She earned a master’s degree in physical education and spent 16 years teaching and coaching at Westminster Christian Academy in the St. Louis area.
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Through her stints as a principal in Florida, Washington state and Illinois, Tameling never lost the itch. She’s a lifelong University of Michigan fan who has always loved to win and hated to lose.
“Yes, I’m very competitive,” she said with a smile.
That should be welcome news for a GCA athletic program that has made steady strides in recent years. The Cougars won three straight sectional championships in baseball from 2014-16 and are coming off of a third boys soccer title as well.
The school has become a regular Class A sectional contender in several sports, and Tameling would like to continue building upon that success.
That process, she says, begins in the lower grades.
“I want us to grow and develop our existing programs,” Tameling said. “Not teams, but programs. A program isn’t just a varsity team. And the best way to have success at a high school level is to grow the program from the bottom up. That’s where I want to see us, in this initial phase, really concentrate on.
“If you want sustained success and you want the culture … that has to start in your lower grades and it has to be part of your DNA, of who you are.”
Part of the lure for Tameling was the fact that Greenwood Christian is still in its adolescence as a school and an athletic program.
“Being at a newer school really appealed to me,” she said. “When I first started teaching and coaching, the school that I was at was only 10 years old. I love that idea of growing with a school.”
Whether that means adding more sports down the line remains to be seen — Tameling says that she’s not opposed to such ideas, but adds that it’s too soon for her to comment on that; her first priority is growing the sports that are already in place.
The keys to that growth, she believes, lie in three words upon which she builds her philosophy — support, embrace and promote.
“I want us to be an athletic department, a group of coaches and players, that support each other, we embrace each other and we promote each other,” Tameling said.
Of course, she’d also like to see Greenwood Christian continue to hang some more banners — but Tameling’s top priority is making sure there’s a solid foundation for sustained success.
“I think if you do things the right way from the bottom on up,” she said, “those things take care of themselves.”
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Sue Tameling
Current position: Athletic director, Greenwood Christian Academy
Previous position: Principal, Chicago Christian High School (Palos Heights, Illinois)
Education: Calvin College (B.A., 1984); Michigan State University (M.A., 1989); Covenant College (M.Ed., 1997)
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