Centennial Spotlight: Tim Dunn

Tim Dunn graduated from Williams College in 1977 and later earned a master’s degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He arrived at Country Day in 1986 from an east coast boarding school. He then went on to teach AP biology and chemistry while coaching baseball and football over the span of his 35-year Country Day career.

This past May, our community gathered to celebrate Coach Tim Dunn’s induction into the CCDS Athletic Hall of Fame. He had 782 career wins – 563 in baseball (including two state championships) and 219 in football (including two state final four appearances). Read below for excerpts from an interview with this Country Day legend.

Part of your genius was your ability to connect with and motivate teenage boys from varied backgrounds and with different personalities, strengths and weaknesses. What made it easy for you to connect with students?
What made it easy to connect with all my players is the school’s general ethos that they accept a wide range of backgrounds into the school; it’s a very diverse community. It doesn’t take long for them to become fast friends…it’s less cliquey than most schools because of that.

What do you miss the most about working at Country Day since you retired?
Both teaching and coaching together, just watching them grow from freshman year to senior year, both physically and mentally. Probably athletics even more so. These boys change immensely from 13 years old to 18 years old. Just seeing the progress is one of my favorite things.

What was your best advice to a new faculty member?
Get involved with the school beyond your own classroom, in whatever capacity suits your abilities and desires.… You establish an incredible amount of credibility with your students if you are involved in other activities and support the other activities that are going on.

Many would say you motivated them both in the classroom and on the field, what was the secret to your success?
I had a very wise older teacher tell me that you have only one hat: it’s your hat.

In your tenure as an Upper School faculty member and coach, did you ever experience even a slight twinge of remorse for not following the rules and making up your own?
You just have to be a little sneaky about it. It works out OK…. My philosophy was to apologize afterwards.

What is the best team you ever coached?
I will not answer that question. I never had a team I regretted having. I suppose the team my son was on because it was also his buddies who hung around our house.

What was your favorite moment, not including a win or championship, from a coaching perspective and a teaching perspective?
My favorite moment from a coaching perspective was probably watching the winning run cross the plate in a state championship game. It was pretty electric and it’s a big crowd there. And from a teaching point of view…there are so many. Having kids coming out of the AP biology exam feeling confident that they were well prepared and that things went well. And then later on hearing students that went on in those fields. I always taught my classroom like everyone in the class was going to go into this field…to prepare them to be scientists. The same thing with coaching. I wanted to prepare them to play at the next level.

How would former students describe you?
They would think I was funny sometimes, corny other times. I never lost my temper. One good piece of advice I got was to act mad before you were actually mad.

How would you best describe your tenure at Country Day as a coach, teacher, and mentor?
Rewarding. I feel like I didn’t have a job, it was a life. It never felt like work, it was a life you chose. It didn’t seem worthwhile to treat it just as a job.

What makes the Country Day community so special?
So many teachers have their kids here going to school, and there is a lot of value in that, and it’s easier to become part of the community when you do that. And because we have students from so many zip codes, it’s important that this place becomes a community…. Making this a community involves the teachers, the coaches, the parents, and the students all in it together and having pride in what we produce.

What did you love about coaching?
The weekly challenge. Getting out of the classroom and onto the field. Doing something physical, even though on a Friday night you wouldn’t get home until 11 o’clock sometimes. Putting all that time in made it valuable to me. And realizing how important it was for the athletes themselves, how crucial it was to their lives.…. If you want to have fun at something, you have to take that thing seriously. I never thought of sports as being recreational. The disappointment that comes with losing is just as important as the joy that comes with winning.

You can watch the full interview here.