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Stroke claims beloved Northwest principal

The Tampa community is greiving Mark Dafeldecker, 49, who died last week.

By BILL COATS
Published September 24, 2005

ODESSA - Grief took many forms last week.

A third-grade girl cried for hours. A fourth-grade boy took a quiet walk behind his house and returned teary-eyed.

The University of South Florida women's soccer team put on black armbands, then won a cliffhanger game.

Children drew pictures, asked touching questions and attached flowers to the fence at Northwest Elementary School.

And a cafeteria worker there opened the refrigerator, saw a big can of peaches and broke down.

Mark Dafeldecker, Northwest's 49-year-old principal, would stop by most mornings to order peaches and two bagels - one for himself and one for his secretary. But last week, he came no more.

After a stroke claimed the life of Dafeldecker, a robust, infectiously cheerful man, the news floored families at Northwest and beyond. It stunned the staff at Carrollwood's Cannella Elementary School, where Dafeldecker's wife Cheryl is principal. And it tore through the Tampa area soccer community, where Dafeldecker had played and coached since moving to Tampa in 1982.

"This is a man who touched thousands of lives," said Toni Wasp, Northwest's PTA president.

Dafeldecker's road to Northwest began in high school in Neptune, N.J., a soccer hotbed. Turned on to the sport by a younger brother, he played intramural soccer at West Chester State College in Pennsylvania.

A 1981 trip to a Tampa coaching clinic changed Dafeldecker's life. Tampa had the Tampa Bay Rowdies, a popular pro soccer team, and USF, a growing university. And even in December, coeds were sunbathing at the pool.

"He thought he had gone to heaven," Cheryl Dafeldecker said.

So Dafeldecker transferred to USF and hired on with the Rowdies' youth soccer camps.

In 1982 he began a teaching internship at Witter Elementary School. He met Cheryl, a teacher there. She was about to learn a lot about soccer.

They married a year later, and would have a daughter, Erin, in 1985, and a son, Colin, in 1993.

Dafeldecker was a popular teacher at Northwest, where colleagues elected him Teacher of the Year in 1991.

"You know, I'm going to be principal here some day," he would tell secretary Karen Vreeland.

The prediction came true, and he became "Mr. D" in 1998.

In his off-hours, Dafeldecker coached in Temple Terrace, Pasco County and, more recently, the huge HC United Soccer Club.

He also played in an over-30 league.

As Cheryl tells it, one Sunday afternoon Dafeldecker found himself paired against a quick opponent who seemed suspiciously young. He tried to neutralize the man with a clutching, bumping, dirty style of play.

The player later asked him, aren't you Coach Daf? "You used to coach me."

Dafeldecker was devastated at the example he had just set, Cheryl recalled. "He said, "I'll never do that again.' "

Over the years his coaching reputation became quite the opposite.

"It was totally for the kids, not about himself," said Ed Austin, the former Rowdies star now a leader in HC United. Although coaches' egos can be huge, Austin said that Dafeldecker kept his tucked away.

"He'd rather have 14 good kids that are doing the right thing than have a winning season," said Adrian Bush, the club's coaching director and the men's soccer coach at the University of Tampa.

Bush recalled a Clearwater tournament in which Dafeldecker's team received a disputed penalty kick. It was a chance to win the game. Instead, Dafeldecker argued with the referee.

"Both coaches knew it was the wrong call," said Bush. "He told his kid to kick it out of bounds."

Dafeldecker coached both of his children, and Erin landed a soccer scholarship at USF.

The team was so much a part of their life that funeral arrangements for Dafeldecker were planned around the weekend's games: Visitation was set for Saturday night, after the team returned from a game at Providence.

The funeral, Monday night, will follow a game today against Connecticut.

Interviewed four years ago for a Florida Youth Soccer Association newsletter, Dafeldecker said what he enjoyed most about coaching was interacting with the players.

"There's nothing that can keep you younger," he said. "The world around them has changed, but kids are kids are kids. They're still an open book; what they learn is what really matters."

He also believed strongly in fun. Austin described a practice Dafeldecker conducted just a few weeks ago.

"He was smiling and they were laughing. He had them running, and they were having so much fun, they didn't realize they were running."

At Northwest, Dafeldecker taught kids an impish "secret wave," bending a lone index finger toward them. He preferred the hallways to his desk, and was chronically late for meetings.

He liked to float an idea, then wait for a teacher to rise to the challenge and run with it.

He would tell Vreeland, "You've got to pick your battles. And you've got to figure out what's best for the kids."

He was a frequent visitor to Cannella and its after-school events after Cheryl became principal there.

"A lot of people never achieve a natural co-existence with their jobs, and they clearly had that," said Derek Gores, who worked with Mark Dafeldecker to start a Dad's Club at Cannella, modeled after one at Northwest.

"When he called her on the phone, she would giggle and turn red and laugh, like a teenager in love," said Tiffany Michaud, Cannella's media specialist. "She would glow when she talked about him."

Two weeks ago, through Dafeldecker's final week at Northwest, he complained of headaches.

"It's a little foggy there," Dafeldecker told Vreeland. Maybe he needed new contact lenses, he said. On that Thursday, he said his stomach was bothering him.

Early Friday morning, Mark and Cheryl Dafeldecker left before dawn to fly to Milwaukee, where Erin was to play in a game against Marquette. Dafeldecker vomited on the plane, and later in a hotel lobby, Cheryl said. He seemed distant, absent-minded. They suspected food poisoning. They skipped the soccer game.

Team trainers tried to help, but Dafeldecker's pain intensified. Calling 9-1-1, Cheryl squeezed Mark's right hand. It didn't squeeze back, startling her. With his left hand, Mark lifted his right forearm. He spoke emphatically, but with slurring: "STROKE!"

Ambulances took Dafeldecker to an emergency room, then another hospital 6 miles away. Initial medications helped him regain speech and feeling throughout his body. Erin arrived from the game, a 4-1 loss, and Dafeldecker quizzed her about it.

Then his right side went limp again. Through clinched teeth he instructed Cheryl: "Tell them my speech is deteriorating. I have to think too hard to speak."

Dafeldecker looked at his daughter. With his left index finger, he pointed to his eye, then his heart, then Erin. I love you.

She wept. He smiled and wagged the finger.

Nurses administered a sedative, and Dafeldecker was off to the ICU, unconscious.

On Saturday, the Dafeldeckers learned a blood clot had lodged at a fork of major arteries near Dafeldecker's brain stem. He was on life support.

They arranged to donate his organs, including knee tendons - a common transplant for injured soccer players.

The soccer team huddled in tears at its hotel.

"A lot of the girls called their parents, their dads, to pass the news onto them," said Jenna Ball, an outside defender for USF. Back in Tampa, word flooded among the Saturday morning games. Faculty meetings were called at Cannella and then at Northwest.

On Sunday, the day after Dafeldecker died, USF faced the University of North Florida. Erin had pondered the game on the flight home. I want to play, she decided.

"My dad (said) you can't miss a game," she explained. "It's game day."

USF scored with 28 seconds to go, and won 1-0.

"Throughout the whole game, I felt him being there," Erin said.

The team gave the game ball to 12-year-old Colin.

When Northwest Elementary resumed classes on Monday, a team of grief counselors filled the media center. Teachers invited children to talk about their feelings or express them on paper.

One boy turned in a drawing. It depicted Erin playing for USF. Mr. D watched her, from atop a stairway reaching into the sky, a rainbow overhead.

[Last modified September 24, 2005, 19:34:56]